Marni Nixon dies at 86
 

The real voice behind so many 'Singers' in hollywood musicals of the 50's, 60's and 70's. The real voice doing the singing in "The King And I", "My Fair Lady," "West Side Story" and so many others. Such a wonderful voice

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/ar...s-86.html?_r=0

Wonka has left the building.
 

“On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.”
-Gene Wilder
(11 June 1933- 28 August 2016


http://www.dclibrary.org/sites/defau...?itok=5Dg8xgMz

Sad! He was a favy of mine. :(

Darrell Ward
 

August 29, 2016

Ice Road Truckers star Darrell Ward died in a plane crash on his way to shoot a TV series in Montana, according to US Weekly. The news came in the form of a tragic press release written on Ward’s Facebook page on Sunday. The reality TV star recently finished filming season 10 of the hit series, Ice Road Truckers. He was 52.

According to KPAX, Darrell and his co-pilot, Mark Milotz, were attempting to land on a private airstrip in Rock Creek when the Cessna 182 went down. The news outlet writes, “Witnesses who were watching and waiting for the plane to land say the plane went into a stall as it pulled up and the pilot never regained control.” The aircraft hit the south shoulder of the Interstate 90 near the Rock Creed exit at about 3pm before catching fire near mile marker 126.

Ward was about to begin filming a documentary-style TV show about plane wreck recoveries, according to Fox News. He and Milotz were declared dead at the scene. A rep for the show told Fox411, “We are saddened by the tragic loss of Darrell Ward, a beloved member of the HISTORY family. He will be greatly missed and our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time.”

A close friend of Ward, named Chuck Campbell, told Fox411, “To know Darrell Ward is an honor and a privilege that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. We say good bye to an amazing man who made everyone around him feel special. Part of me died with him.”

Facebook Press Release:

Press Release: It’s with great sadness to report we have lost our Montana Legend at the young age of 52.

Darrell Ward had just left The Great American Truck Show in Dallas, Texas where he enjoyed meeting numerous fans and friends and was heading to Missoula to begin filming a pilot for his new documentary style show involving the recovery of plane wrecks when he and his co-pilot crashed and lost their lives. An investigation is ongoing and more information will be made available at a later time as the National Transportation Safety Board will be handling they investigation.

They things Darrell loved most were his family including his kids and grand-kids & trucking.

Darrell Ward rose to fame with his role on the extremely popular History Channel’s reality show, Ice Road Truckers. Darrell just finished filming Season X earlier this year for the show and had just learned that he had a green light this past weekend for an additional season on the show originally slated to begin filming in the winter of 2017. When Darrell wasn’t hitting the Ice Roads he would be back in Montana doing what Darrel loved best as a log hauler and occasionally helped local authorities fight forest fires.

Trucking has always been a large part of Darrell’s life; from running the harvest rigs with his grandparents and family, to driving trucks from Montana to Alaska and all roads in between. In his free time, you could usually find Darrell giving back to the community any chance he got, he had promoted the most recent food drive to help victims in the Louisiana Floods and was scheduled to appear as the grand marshal for the Truck Convoy for Special Olympics in Nova Scotia.
In his free time, Darrell enjoyed hunting, fishing, camping, dirt bike riding and all things outdoors. A self-proclaimed “ADRENALINE JUNKIE”, Darrell was up for any adventure.


http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/darrel...-trucking-age/

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf" author dead at 88
 

Legendary playwright Edward Albee dead at 88

(CNN) — Legendary playwright Edward Albee, widely considered one of the greats of his generation, has died at the age of 88, according to his personal assistant Jakob Holder.

Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, died Friday afternoon at his home in Montauk, New York. Albee died after a short illness, according to Holder.

Albee's career spanned five decades. His first play, "The Zoo Story," came out in the late '50s and centered on two men who have a chance encounter on a New York City park bench. It has a violent conclusion but helped set the tone for Albee's raw and uncompromising works to come.

His best known work is arguably "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" an intimate portrait of a volatile marriage.

It was after that play that Albee began drawing comparisons to the likes of August Wilson, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

The play was adapted into a film in 1966. It starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who both went on to be nominated for Academy Awards.

Though the play had been out for years, the film itself was the subject of controversy due to its use of profanity — like "screw you." Warner Bros. agreed to put a warning on the film that moviegoers under the age of 18 would not be admitted without an adult. R ratings did not exist at the time.

Albee's work could hit nerves like no other.

"If you're going to spend $100 or more to go to the theater, something should happen to you," he told Charlie Rose in 2008. "Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values or the way you think about things and maybe you should come out of the theater (with) something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing or thinking about change. But if you go there and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted your $100."

He was also known for the plays "A Delicate Balance" and "Seascape," among others.

Notable figures in theater have already begun to mourn Albee's passing.

Arnold Palmer
 

Arnold Palmer, one of the greatest golfers ever to pick up a club and the object of a massive fan base that called itself “Arnie’s Army” as he recorded seven major victories, died Sunday at 87 in Pittsburgh.

Born in Latrobe, Pa., Palmer’s endearing personality and skill on the links earned him the nickname “The King,” during a career whose beginning coincided with the birth of television sports. Along the way, he became one of the wealthiest celebrity endorsers, a philanthropist, golf course designer and pilot.

Palmer’s long string of victories on the PGA tour began in 1955, and he became one of the sport’s most recognizable personalities, along with Jack Nicklaus. Palmer’s charismatic personality also made him a sought after pitchman, for several products, perhaps most famously Quaker State motor oil.

"Arnold Palmer was the everyday man's hero," Nicklaus said. "From the modest upbringing, Arnold embodied the hard-working strength of America."

Palmer’s importance to subsequent generations of golfers was evident Sunday, as tributes poured in via social media.

Palmer won the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and in 1974 was one of the 13 original inductees into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Palmer learned to play from his father, Milfred "Deacon" Palmer, who the club pro and greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club. It was ten that he developed his trademark pigeon-toed putting stance.

He earned a scholarship to Wake Forest, but left to join the U.S. Coast Guard in the late 1940s. He returned to school three years later, and won the 1954 U.S. Amateur championship.

Palmer turned pro a year later, winning the1955 Canadian Open the first of a string of championships. Three years later, he won the Masters Tournament, cementing his place among the sport’s greats.

Palmer won 62 titles on the PGA Tour, with the final one coming in the 1973 Bob Hope Desert Classic. Among his wins were four at the Masters, two at the British Open and one at the U.S. Open. He finished second in the U.S. Open four times, was runner-up three times in the PGA Championship.

Palmer’s best years were in the early 1960s, but he remained an immensely popular figure for the rest of his life. In 2000, Golf Digest raked him the sixth greatest player of all time. Although his biggest purse, $50,000, came when he won the Westchester Classic in 1971, Palmer’s popularity allowed him to earn as much as $30 million per year in endorsements and business deals as recently as a few years ago.

Palmer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

Palmer’s friendly and folksy manner made him a favorite of the press, and his quips and quotes were as legendary as his short game.

Harris, a self-proclaimed “queer high femme charmer from the South,”
 

This link is all I have found on Amanda and I feel it is quite appropriate here. So sad at such a young, promising and impressionist style to now be gone.



Editor’s Note: We are deeply saddened by the passing of Amanda Arkansassy Harris. Amanda was a talented artist, a beacon for the queer femme community and an absolute joy to work with. Our hearts go out to everyone in mourning.

https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/07/12...nsassy-harris/

Agnes Nixon, pioneer in daytime tv
 

The grand dame of daytime television drama, Agnes Nixon liked to say that “everyone's life is a soap opera.” For proof, she offered up her own.

She had an “abandonment complex” because her parents divorced soon after she was born. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic enclave in Nashville in the 1930s and 1940s, she felt painfully different because the other children all seemed to have fathers. Hers was “nearly psychotic” and schemed to crush her post-collegiate dream of being a writer.

He wanted his daughter to follow him into his burial garments business and arranged for her to meet Irna Phillips, a pioneering writer of radio serials her father was certain would “set me straight” regarding the foolishness of a writing career, Nixon often said.

And then Nixon invariably inserted a soap opera staple into the story — the plot twist. During the meeting, Phillips looked up from reading the sample script that was Nixon's resume and asked, “How would you like to work for me?”

"It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Nixon later said. “It was freedom.”

Although her characters were inevitably embroiled in melodrama, Nixon was repeatedly honored for elevating soaps during a television career that spanned more than 60 years. She pioneered socially relevant themes and dealt with them seriously, bringing attention to such once-taboo topics as racism, AIDS, lesbian relationships and teenage prostitution.

In 1962, Nixon wrote a story line for “The Guiding Light” on CBS about a character who develops uterine cancer and has a life-saving hysterectomy. The network and show sponsor Proctor & Gamble agreed to the plot only if the words “cancer,” “uterus” and “hysterectomy” were not used.

When “One Life to Live” debuted in 1968, it featured a complicated story aimed at making viewers confront their prejudices, Nixon later said. It involved a young black woman that the audience is led to believe is white; she plans to marry a white doctor, but later falls in love with a black resident.

When Nixon was recognized in 2010 with a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences said that she had “totally changed the traditionally escapist nature of daytime serials while straining to make the world a better place.”

She wasn’t trying to “break barriers,” Nixon said in 1999 on the TV biography “Intimate Portraits,” but thought it was insane “to say that entertainment and public service can never be in the same story.”

In 1981, the television academy had given Nixon its highest honor, the Trustees Award, for “distinguished service to television and the public.” She was the first woman to receive the distinction, joining an elite group that includes Edward R. Murrow and Bob Hope.

After writing the initial weeks of “Search for Tomorrow” for CBS in 1951, she played a role in the success of six other soap operas.

She helped Phillips launch “As the World Turns” on CBS in 1956 and, two years later, joined the network’s “Guiding Light” as head writer. In 1964, she took charge of NBC’s ratings-challenged “Another World” and turned it around.

Within four years, ABC came calling with a powerful enticement — creative control. Her husband, Robert Nixon, left his job as a Chrysler Corp. executive, and the couple formed a company to produce her first solo effort, “One Life to Live.”

The show quickly won praise for realism after premiering in 1968. A story on teenage venereal disease caused 50,000 viewers to write in, and an official at the Centers for Disease Control told Nixon: “You've shown us how to reach the teenagers of America,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1991.

When ABC wanted a second daytime drama, Nixon came up with “All My Children” in 1970. She also co-created a third soap for the network, “Loving,” that aired from 1983 to 1995.

Nixon readily acknowledged “All My Children” as her favorite dramatic offspring. The show was set in Pine Valley, the presumptive dramatic equivalent of Rosemont, the Philadelphia suburb where Nixon lived in a pre-Revolutionary War home. She based archvillain Adam Chandler, who didn't “know how to love,” on her father and gave her favorite character, wickedly manipulative Erica Kane, abandonment issues.

Susan Lucci became one of daytime’s most popular stars playing Erica from the show’s earliest days until the program’s end in September 2011. She repeatedly called Nixon “a genius as a storyteller.”

When “One Life to Live” left the air in early 2012, few network soap operas remained. As women increasingly entered the workforce, viewership eroded and the genre continued to lose ground to cable and offerings on the Internet.

“The name of entertainment is escape,” Nixon said in 1981 in People magazine, and it made her wealthy, one excruciatingly slow plot turn at a time. In the mid-1970s, Nixon had sold both “One Life” and “All My Children” to ABC for an undisclosed sum.

“I loved the writing and I hated the business,” Nixon told The Times in 1998, when it was reported that she earned more than $1 million a year.

She was born Agnes Eckhardt on Dec. 10, 1922, in Chicago, to Harry and Agnes Eckhardt and grew up in Nashville living with her bookkeeper mother and extended family. Previous reports put her year of birth as 1927 but the announcement of her funeral Mass said she was born five years earlier.

At Northwestern University, she studied drama alongside Charlton Heston and Patricia Neal but felt “outclassed,” as an actor, Nixon later said, and turned to writing.

Days after earning a bachelor's degree in the late 1940s, Nixon was writing for Phillips on a radio soap. When Phillips headed west to work in television, Nixon moved to New York to write for early prime-time TV dramas.

On a blind date in 1950, she met her future husband and soon agreed to marry him on one condition — that she could continue her career. They settled in the Philadelphia area and had four children in five years. With no time to travel to New York City for work, she returned to Phillips and soaps, writing at home and mailing in her scripts.

Having a bustling career in the “pre-Betty Friedan days” was tough and made her feel like a misfit, she told the Washington Post in 1983.

For years, she and her husband split their time between the Philadelphia area and New York City. After he died in 1996, Nixon said she found writing “All My Children” therapeutic.

By then, she had long devoted herself to long-range plotting and still followed her mentor’s maxim: “We don’t just live the high points and low points, we live minute by minute.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituar...nap-story.html

Gloria Naylor, award-winning author who wrote 'The Women of Brewster Place,' dies at 66
 

Gloria Naylor, whose debut novel "The Women of Brewster Place," became a bestseller, a National Book Award winner and a TV miniseries released through Oprah Winfrey's production company, has died at the age of 66.

Naylor's other books included "Linden Hills," ''Mama Day" and "Bailey's Cafe."

"The Women of Brewster Place" is Naylor's self-described "love letter" to a determined community of seven African American women in a decaying housing project, the exact location unspecified. It was published in 1982 and praised by the New York Times as "emotionally satisfying and technically accomplished," with Brewster Place itself the narrative's star. "Brewster Place" won the National Book Award for best first fiction and was often likened to novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among others as landmark books by black women.

Naylor, who grew up in New York City, would credit her mother for making "Brewster Place" possible.

"Realizing that I was a painfully shy child, she gave me my first diary and told me to write my feelings down in there," Naylor said in her National Book Award acceptance speech. "Over the years that diary was followed by reams and reams of paper that eventually culminated into 'The Women of Brewster Place.' And I wrote that book as a tribute to her and other black woman who, in spite of the very limited personal circumstances, somehow manage to hold a fierce belief in the limitless possibilities of the human spirit."

Winfrey was among the novel's many fans and the miniseries came out in 1989, with a cast including Winfrey, Cicely Tyson and Robin Givens. "The Women of Brewster of Place" was also adapted into a musical, and Naylor revisited the setting in her 1998 novel "The Men of Brewster Place."

Naylor was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and received a master's from Yale University in African American studies, a degree earned around the time "Women of Brewster Place" was published. By the late 1970s, she had published stories in Essence magazine that would later become part of "Brewster Place."

In college, she had vowed to write at least four novels, and at least one that would outlast her. Her fiction often centered on a common meeting place, like the diner in "Bailey's Cafe," and her characters tended to be dreamers whose fantasies reflected Naylor's early love for fairy tales.

"It runs throughout my work, the theme of dreaming," she told The Associated Press in 1992. "I ask myself why it always seems important. I am a daydreamer and I once was an avid daydreamer. I would dream in serials, the daydreams would start where the others left off."

"I was still reading (fairy tales) ... at age 16. You wanted Prince Charming and I looked too long. At some point, an adult woman has to wake up and smell the coffee."

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituar...nap-story.html

Joan Marie Johnson Faust
 

Joan Marie Johnson Faust, one of the founding members of the New Orleans girl group the Dixie Cups, died Oct. 5, 2016, according to multiple news sources. She was 72.

Sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Lee Hawkins formed the Dixie Cups along with Faust, their cousin. In June 1964, the trio famously kicked the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with the song “Chapel of Love.” It proved to be their biggest hit, selling more than 1 million copies.

Faust and her cousins had several other hits including 1964’s “People Say,” which reached No. 12, and “You Should Have Seen the Way He Looked at Me,” which made it into the Top 40. In 1965, the Dixie Cups had a top-20 hit with their version of a traditional New Orleans song “Iko Iko.”

Faust became a member of the Jehovah’s Witness religious denomination and left the Dixie Cups after the trio stopped recording temporarily in 1966.

In 2007, the Dixie Cups were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Tom Hayden (1939 - 2016)
 

Tom Hayden, an activist, politician, and author who was one of the famed "Chicago Seven" who protested the 1968 Democratic National Convention, died Oct. 23, according to his wife, Barbara Williams. He was 76.

The former husband of actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda, Hayden was one of the giants of the counterculture in the 1960s, a radical anti-war protester who advocated for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War. Later in life, he developed a career in California politics and wrote a number of books.

Hayden's activism began in the 1950s as he attended the University of Michigan, where in 1960 he was among the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As a member of SDS, Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement, the group's manifesto, in which he railed against U.S. foreign policy and politics, racial discrimination, and business, while advocating for civil disobedience and political reform.

Hayden would become president of the SDS in 1962 after returning from a trip south as one of the Freedom Riders who challenged the legitimacy of segregation on buses. In 1965, he took his activism even further afield, traveling for the first time to North Vietnam, where he toured villages and met with an American POW. About his experiences, Hayden wrote the 1966 book "The Other Side," the first of his publications.

The fight to end the Vietnam War took place at home, too, and it was there that Hayden and a number of his fellow activists rose up in protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. With the goal of protesting President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam War policies, Hayden and the rest of the Chicago Seven organized a rally in Grant Park – a rally that ended up playing host to 15,000 protesters who turned it into a riot.

Hayden, along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner, was charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot for his actions in organizing the DNC protest. The men became known as the Chicago Seven as they fought their case to federal court, where it dragged on for months as many counterculture icons of the day were called upon to testify and the defendants pulled stunts including appearing in judicial robes with police uniforms underneath.

In the end, all seven of the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charge, though Hayden and four others were convicted of inciting a riot, sentenced to five years in prison and fines of $5,000 each. Upon appeal, the convictions were reversed.

It was 1972 before the appeals of the Chicago Seven trial were complete. That same year, Hayden and Fonda traveled to Vietnam in a highly controversial visit that left her dubbed "Hanoi Jane" and angered many in the U.S. But it would only be a few years before Hayden began to tone down his rhetoric as a budding politician.

Hayden's first political run came in 1976, when he made a bid for the U.S. Senate and came in second in the primary. In 1982, he was successfully elected to the California State Assembly, where he served until 1992, when he was elected to the California State Senate. He served through 2000, during which time he attempted runs for California Governor and Mayor of Los Angeles, both of which were unsuccessful.

In 1998, Hayden wrote the Hayden Act, am animal welfare act that extends the minimum amount of time an animal in a public pound or shelter has before being euthanized. The act was made California law in 1999.

Hayden taught at a number of colleges and universities, including UCLA and Harvard, and he wrote books including "Reunion: A Memoir" (1988), "Ending the War in Iraq" (2007), and "The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama" (2009).

Bobby Vee (1943 - 2016)
 

Bobby Vee, the 1960s pop singer whose hits inlcuded "Take Good Care of My Baby" and "Run to Him," has died at 73 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, as Robert Velline, Vee's big break came on the heels of a tragedy: he was hired at 15 to fill a concert bill in Moorhead, Minnesota, for what had been intended to be the next show on the 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour after the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Following the exposure he received from that performance, Vee recorded a single, Suzie Baby, that did well in the upper Midwest and landed him a contract with Liberty Records. Vee reached the top ten in 1960 with "Rubber Ball" and "Devil or Angel," and 1961 saw him notch a number one hit with "Take Good Care of My Baby" and a number two hit with "Run to Him."

Vee continued to release hits through the 1960s, more than three dozen in the top 100 in total, including "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," "Come Back When You Grow Up" and "Charms."

Though his run of hits ended after 1970, Vee performed until 2011, when he announced his retirement due to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

R.I.P.
 

Omg, Tom Hayden and Bobby Vee in one day? Having spent my college years in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor was very involved with the war and civil rights movement. Our campus SDS rep. was Diana Orton who died in a townhouse that blew up in Greenwich Village.

We learned so much from Tom Hayden. Thank you Tom for being brave and true, you opened up an entire generation to owning and having agency in our lives.

Tom Hayden started by speaking and organizing at Univ of Mich. It was the time that formed me at someone with a social conscience and possibly a future social worker who never gave up the concept of social justice for psychotherapy.

Very sad day indeed.

Bobby Vee was part of my initial music way before the Beatles and Stones.

Leonard Cohen died. I really will miss his poetry, his lyrics, his golden voice. He was something special. I didn't know I could be much sadder than I already was these past couple of days. I was wrong.

RIP
 

OMG Leonard is gone? I loved his music and lyrics more than any singer of his genre. I own most of his music and listen often. Bless you Leonard for all you have given in your career of all your music and that wonderful voice.

Me too. I will miss him so much. He just put out a new dvd titled "You Want It Darker". Here's some of the words from the title track. I think he was ready.

If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame
If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

Leonard Cohen
 

The man was brilliant.

Aside from the original, I've heard many beautiful renditions of his most well-known song, "Hallelujah", but I recently discovered this one. It's incredibly moving.



May his soul rest in peace.

~
 

RIP Leonard , amazing artist ~ on your behalf I am going to sleep to your music :)

Gwen Ifill, Journalist and Debate Moderator, Dies at 61
 

Gwen Ifill, an award-winning television journalist for NBC and PBS, former reporter for The New York Times and author who moderated vice-presidential debates in 2004 and 2008, died on Monday in Washington. She was 61.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016...it-blog427.jpg

Her death, at a hospice facility, was announced by Sara Just, executive producer of “PBS NewsHour.” The cause was cancer, PBS said.

Ms. Ifill was the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and the co-anchor and co-managing editor, with Judy Woodruff, of PBS NewsHour, the culmination of a career that began in 1981 at The Baltimore Evening Sun. Both she and Ms. Woodruff moderated a Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in February.

Ms. Ifill later reported for The Washington Post and The Times, covering Congress, presidential campaigns and national political conventions.

She is also the author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” which was published on inauguration day in 2009.

A full obituary will appear soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/bu...fill-dies.html

Robert Vaughn (1932 - 2016)
 

Actor Robert Vaughn, known for roles on television's "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and movies such as "The Magnificent Seven" and "Superman III," died Friday, Nov. 11, 2016, of leukemia. He was 83.

Vaughn began his acting career in the 1950s, his first film role an uncredited appearance in "The Ten Commandments" in 1956. In 1959, he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role in "The Young Philadelphians." The next year, he appeared as Lee in "The Magnificent Seven." Before his death, Vaughn was the last surviving actor of those who portrayed the movie's seven main characters.

But it was Vaughn's role as Napoleon Solo on the TV spy drama "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." that cemented his fame. Running for four seasons, from 1964 to 1968, the show was instantly popular and spawned numerous spy genre copycat shows.

In the 1980s, Vaughn appeared in a recurring role on the final season of "The A-Team," and as villain Ross Webster in the movie "Superman III." Continuing to act late in life, he co-starred as a grifter on the British television show "Hustle" from 2004 to 2012.

Dawn Coe-Jones (1960 - 2016)
 

Dawn Coe-Jones, a Canadian professional golfer, died Saturday, Nov. 12, 2016, after a battle with brain cancer. She was 56.

Dawn Coe was born Oct. 19, 1960, in Campbell River, British Columbia. As a teenager, she worked at a nearby golf course as a groundskeeper. She attended Lamar University, where she was an All-American golfer, and graduated with a degree in elementary education. She won several amateur events, including the Canadian Women’s Amateur in 1983.

She joined the LPGA tour in 1984 and would continue to tour until 2008. During that time, she won three events: the 1992 Women’s Kemper Open, the 1994 HealthSouth Palm Beach Classic, and the 1995 Chrysler-Plymouth Tournament of Champions. She amassed more than $3.3 million in winnings during her career.

Coe-Jones was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 2003.

Sharon Jones, Powerful Voice of Soul With the Dap-Kings, Dies at 60
 

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016...-master768.jpg
(Sharon Jones performing at Radio City Music Hall in 2009. Credit Nicholas Roberts for the New York Times)

Sharon Jones, the soul singer and powerful voice of the band the Dap-Kings, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer that had been in remission but returned last year. She was 60.

Ms. Jones’s death was confirmed by Judy Miller Silverman, her publicist. She said Ms. Jones was surrounded by members of the Dap-Kings and other loved ones when she died.

She continued performing throughout the summer, even while undergoing chemotherapy that she said caused neuropathy in her feet and legs and restricted her movements onstage. But Ms. Jones remained undeterred.

“Getting out on that stage, that’s my therapy,” Ms. Jones said in a New York Times interview published in July. “You have to look at life the way it is. No one knows how long I have. But I have the strength now, and I want to continue.”

The summer tour promoted “I’m Still Here,” a single with the Dap-Kings that detailed Ms. Jones’s birth in a brutally segregated South, a childhood in the burned-out Bronx, and a career hampered by record executives who considered her “too short, too fat, too black and too old.”

Ms. Jones was that rare music star who found fame in middle age, when she was in her 40s.

In addition to working as a correction officer at Rikers Island and an armed guard for Wells Fargo, Ms. Jones, who had grown up singing gospel in church choirs, initially dabbled in professional music as a session singer and the vocalist in a wedding band, Good N Plenty.

After meeting Gabriel Roth, the producer and songwriter also known as Bosco Mann, Ms. Jones made the leap from backup singer to main attraction. Desco Records released her debut 7-inch vinyl single, “Damn It’s Hot,” in 1996. She was 40.

With the encouragement and songwriting of Mr. Roth, who co-founded the Brooklyn soul and funk revival label Daptone Records and serves as the bandleader of the Dap-Kings, Ms. Jones’s full-length debut, “Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,” came out in 2002. She would go on to release four more studio albums and two compilations on the small label, a point of pride for the fiercely independent Ms. Jones.

“A major label’s going to do what?” she said to Billboard last year. “I sing one or two songs, they give me a few million dollars, which they’re going to want back, and then the next thing you know, the next record don’t sell, and then they’re kicking me to the curb. With us, this is our label, this is our project.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016...b2-blog427.jpg
(Ms. Jones in 2007. She fought pancreatic cancer after a 2013 diagnosis. Chester Higgins, Jr. for the New York Times)

Sharon Lafaye Jones was born on May 4, 1956, in Augusta, Ga., though her family lived just across the border in North Augusta, S.C. In “Miss Sharon Jones!” the singer recalled that her mother had needed a cesarean section, but because of segregation in the Jim Crow south, she was not allowed in the hospital’s main unit and was instead relegated to a storage room.

After her parents separated, Ms. Jones, the youngest of six children, moved with her mother to New York and was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “But New York in 1960, no peace to be found,” she sang on “I’m Still Here.” “Segregation, drugs and violence was all around.”

She went on to attend Brooklyn College and acted in “Sister Salvation,” an Off-Broadway play, before turning her focus to music.

With her late start, Ms. Jones recorded and performed at an unrelenting pace, and in the last year and a half of her life she made two albums, opened two national tours for Hall & Oates, was featured in a television commercial for Lincoln (performing the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider”) and starred in “Miss Sharon Jones!,” a documentary about her life.

The film traced her life from the diagnosis of Stage 2 pancreatic cancer in 2013 through her triumphant return to the stage in 2015. Ms. Jones is survived by four siblings, seven nieces and three nephews.

“Sharon is always up,” the film’s director, Barbara Kopple, said at the time of its release. “Even when she’s in the room where people are getting chemo, she’s the sunshine.”

During her illness, Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings earned a Grammy nomination in 2015 for best R&B album with “Give the People What They Want.” (“Why is there not a category for soul?” Ms. Jones told Billboard at the time. “That’s my goal. Put me in the right category.”)

The singer, who also collaborated live and on tour with Lou Reed, Phish, Michael Bublé and David Byrne, publicly announced the return of her cancer in September 2015 at the film’s first showing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Doctors, she said, had found a spot on her liver. “I didn’t want people to come up and congratulate me on beating cancer when it’s back,” she said.

That recurrence was treated with radiation. But in May, while she was on tour, cancer cells were found in her stomach, lymph nodes and lungs. Chemotherapy was required, although Ms. Jones changed the regimen to give her greater freedom of movement.

“I need to dance onstage,” she said. “I don’t want something that makes me bedridden. I want to live my life to the fullest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/ar...T.nav=top-news

Sharon is a diamond..the world lost a wonderful sister-
 

:heartbeat:

Gwen Ifill
 

I watched a very nice group presentation of Gwen's peers processing shock over her death, a couple days ago. Gwen was just 4 years older than I, but she died from complications associated with her spiraling case of Endometrial cancer. Gwen was 61. She was on the job, fearless in all she did, was not only well informed on most political subjects, but like her peers discussed on the TV show, Gwen always came to the table with an open mind and looked for other ways in which subject matter could be explored via other points of view or by building in-roads toward discovery of anything controversial or the mundane. Truly a very kind and caring peer in the field of communication (Journalism ). Rest in peace. :rrose:

Florence Henderson
 

Florence Henderson, who went from a Broadway star to become one of America's most beloved television moms in "The Brady Bunch, " has died. She was 82.

On the surface, "The Brady Bunch," with Ms. Henderson as its ever-cheerful matriarch Carol Brady, resembled just another TV sitcom about a family living in suburban America and getting into a different wacky situation each week.

But well after it ended its initial run, in 1974, the show resonated with audiences, and it returned to television in various forms again and again, including "The Brady Bunch Hour" in 1977, "The Brady Brides" in 1981 and "The Bradys" in 1990. It was also seen endlessly in reruns.

Premiering in 1969, it also was among the first shows to introduce to television the blended family.

Early in her career, Henderson appeared in the title role of the musical Fanny, and Rodgers and Hammerstein made her the female lead in a 1952 tour of Oklahoma!, a role she reprised for a Broadway revival in 1954, earning critical plaudits along the way. In a career spanning six decades, Henderson's many credits include playing Maria in a road production of The Sound of Music, Nellie Forbush in a revival of South Pacific, and Mary Morgan in The Girl Who Came to Supper.

A winner of two Gracie Awards, the stage and screen performer's one and only hit on the Billboard charts came in 1970 with the Decca Records release "Conversations," which reached No. 25 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Fidel Castro
 

Fidel Castro, Cuba’s revolutionary leader and former president, has died at 90, his brother Raul Castro announced on Friday night.

Castro was president of Cuba from 1976 to 2008, when he stepped down to allow his brother to take power. He was previously prime minister from the Communist revolution in 1959 to 1976.

Ron Glass
 

Ron Glass, the actor best known for his work on “Barney Miller” and “Firefly,” died Friday, November 26. He was 71.

Glass played the intellectual Det. Ron Harris on the sitcom “Barney Miller” from 1975 – 1982. The show was hailed by critics and police officers for its realistic depiction of police work while also delivering consistent laughs. Much of the humor for his character stemmed from his dapper fashion sense and dreams of becoming a writer. He was nominated for an Emmy for supporting actor in 1982.

Years later he was part of another ensemble show, the sci-fi adventure series “Firefly” (2002). Although the series lasted less than one season it developed a cult following and a film, “Serenity” was released in 2005. Glass played Shepherd Derrial Book, a spiritual leader and moral guide to the rest of the crew of the spaceship Serenity. However, there are frequent references to the character’s less wholesome past.

Glass was born July 10, 1945 in Evansville, Indiana. He studied Drama and Literature at the University of Evansville and made his stage debut at the famed Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He then moved to Los Angeles where he made his first television appearance in an episode of “Sanford and Son” in 1972.

After “Barney Miller” Glass was tapped in 1982 to play neat-freak Felix Unger in an updated version of “The Odd Couple” called “The New Odd Couple.” The series featured an African-American cast and often re-used scripts from earlier Tony Randall/Jack Klugman series. It lasted for one season.

Glass worked consistently in film and television and was a frequent guest star on many popular shows. He played Ross Geller’s divorce lawyer, Russell, on “Friends” and made recent appearances on “CSI” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Frtiz Weaver
 

Fritz Weaver, a stage, film, and television actor whose credits include the TV miniseries "Holocaust," died Saturday. Weaver was 90.

Weaver's earliest acting roles were on TV during the 1950s. He appeared on "The Twilight Zone," both in the original series and the 1985 reboot, and he played characters on "Dr. Kildare," "Mission: Impossible," "Rawhide," and "The Big Valley." Fans of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" may remember Weaver's role in "Tribunal," an episode of the show.

In the 1970s, Weaver acted in the made-for-TV movies "The Legend of Lizzie Borden" and "Holocaust," receiving an Emmy Award nomination for the latter.

Although he was a frequent character actor on TV, Weaver showed theatrical talent as well. He won a Tony Award for the 1970 Broadway play "Child's Play." He received a second Tony nomination for "The Chalk Garden." His theater credits also include "Baker Street," "Love Letters," and "The Crucible."

This made me so sad...

~
 

I feel sad for Anthony Geary, he was Ron Glass' lover ~ they were a very happy couple.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/ar...ies-at-84.html

Pauline Oliveros, Composer Who Championed ‘Deep Listening,’ Dies at 84
By STEVE SMITHNOV. 27, 2016


"Pauline Oliveros, a composer whose life’s work aspired to enhance sensory perception through what she called “deep listening,” died on Thursday at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her spouse, Carole Ione Lewis, a writer and performance artist known as Ione.

Early in her career in the 1960s, Ms. Oliveros avidly adopted cutting-edge technologies, working with magnetic tape and prototype synthesizers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Already active as an improviser, she approached electronic music with a performer’s instincts; to make “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965), which John Rockwell, The New York Times music critic, called “one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music to emerge from the 60s,” she manipulated a recording of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly” on a turntable, augmenting its sounds with oscillators and tape delay.

The resulting piece, Ms. Oliveros wrote, “bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex.”

Gender inequality would be a theme that she addressed repeatedly and tenaciously. An essay she wrote for The Times in 1970 started with a provocative question – “Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers?” – and then enumerated reasons, including gender bias and societal expectations of domestic compliancy.

Ms. Oliveros said in a 2012 Times profile that in 1971, after a period of intense introspection prompted by the Vietnam War, she changed creative course, eventually producing “Sonic Meditations,” a set of 25 text-based instructions meant to provoke thoughtful, creative responses.

“Native,” the most commonly cited example, is also the most succinct: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Embedded within that poetic instruction and the other meditations was a substantial proposition: a total inclusivity, meant to free music from elite specialists and open it up to everyone, regardless of status, experience, or ability.

“All societies admit the power of music or sound. Attempts to control what is heard in the community are universal,” Ms. Oliveros wrote in a preface to the meditations. “Sonic Meditations are an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone, and within groups especially for humanitarian purposes; specifically healing.”

Ms. Oliveros never quit composing, but from the 1970s favored improvisation, adapted elements of ceremonies and rituals encountered in her studies of Native American lore and Eastern religion, and conducted meditative retreats to share her artistic discipline.

One more turning point came in 1988, when Ms. Oliveros and two colleagues — the trombonist, didgeridoo player and composer Stuart Dempster and the vocalist and composer Panaiotis — descended into an extraordinarily resonant disused cistern in Port Townsend, Wash. Their drone-based improvisations were recorded, and selections issued on CD under the title “Deep Listening” in 1989.

Beyond a self-evident pun referring to music played 14 feet underground, “Deep Listening” signified Ms. Oliveros’s emerging aural discipline: a practice that compelled listening not just to the conventional details of a given musical performance — melody, harmony, rhythm, intonation — but also to sounds surrounding that performance, including acoustic space and extra-musical noise.

The process lent its name to a working ensemble, Deep Listening Band, for much of its duration a trio comprising Ms. Oliveros, Mr. Dempster and the keyboardist and composer David Gamper, who died in 2011. Over time, the Deep Listening banner would extend to cover retreats, workshops and lectures in which Ms. Oliveros shared her artistic discipline.

In 2005 Ms. Oliveros rechristened her Pauline Oliveros Foundation the Deep Listening Institute, defining as its mission “creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and nonmusicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages.”

Among other projects, the institute supported the design of software that would allow children with severe physical or cognitive disabilities to improvise music. In 2014, the institute merged with the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

In her final decades Ms. Oliveros formed close bonds with groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble, which brought her work closer to the mainstream canon with performances at Lincoln Center, Miller Theater at Columbia University and elsewhere.

“I’m not dismissive of classical music and the Western canon,” Ms. Oliveros said in 2012. “It’s simply that I can’t be bound by it. I’ve been jumping out of categories all my life.”

Pauline Oliveros was born on May 30, 1932, in Houston to John Oliveros and Edith Gutierrez. Her childhood was accompanied by the sounds of piano lessons taught by her mother and grandmother, bird song and buzzing cicadas, and the curious special effects used on favorite radio serials like “Buck Rogers” and “The Shadow.”

Taking up the accordion as her principal instrument, she also learned to play violin, piano, French horn and tuba.

At 20 Ms. Oliveros moved to California in search of a compositional mentor. She found one in Robert Erickson, a prominent composer, who as the music director of KPFA-FM, a Berkeley radio station, introduced Bay Area listeners to the latest trends in European avant-garde composition.

She explored free improvisation with colleagues like the composer Terry Riley and the bassist and koto player Loren Rush in the late 1950s, and joined Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick at the trailblazing San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962.

When the center was absorbed by Mills College in 1966, Ms. Oliveros served for a year as its director. In 1967 she joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught until 1981. From 2001 she served as distinguished research professor of music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include a John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

In addition to her spouse, Ms. Oliveros is survived by three stepchildren, Alessandro Bovoso, Nico Bovoso and Antonio Bovoso; a brother, John Oliveros, and eight grandchildren.

Correction: November 30, 2016
An obituary on Monday about the composer Pauline Oliveros misstated part of the name of the organization that presented her with the John Cage Award. It is the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, not the Foundation of Contemporary Arts."

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Pauline Oliveros was an out lesbian throughout her long musical career. She was a very courageous artist. I heard her work in performance several times here in NYC. I once spied her hanging out at the back of the concert hall and got up the nerve to introduce myself, but I got anxious and promptly beat a hasty retreat after she smilingly gave me her attention. I'm quite sad to read that she passed.

Grant Tinker, former NBC boss and MTM Enterprises founder, dies at 90
 

Grant Tinker, who brought new polish to the TV world and beloved shows to the audience as both a producer and a network boss, has died. He was 90.

Though he had three tours of duty with NBC, the last as its chairman, Tinker was perhaps best-known as the nurturing hand at MTM Enterprises, the production company he founded in 1970 and ran for a decade.

Nothing less than a creative salon, MTM scored with some TV's most respected and best-loved programs, including "Lou Grant," ''Rhoda," ''The Bob Newhart Show" and, of course, the series that starred his business partner and then-wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

In 1981, Tinker flourished with that low-key approach in a last-ditch effort to save NBC, which was scraping bottom with its earnings, ratings, programs and morale. Five years later, when Tinker left to return to independent production, the network was flush thanks to hits such as "The Cosby Show" and "Hill Street Blues."

Tinker, who had come to NBC as a management trainee in 1949 with legendary founder David Sarnoff still in charge, left the company for the last time at the end of an era, as NBC, along with its parent RCA, was about to be swallowed by General Electric.

In 2005, he won a prestigious Peabody Award honoring his overall career. In receiving his medallion, he called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." He also had received the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Born in 1926, the son of a lumber supplier, Tinker had grown up in Stamford, Connecticut, and graduated from Dartmouth College before his first short stint at NBC.

Then he moved into advertising. At a time when ad agencies were heavily responsible for crafting programs its clients would sponsor, Tinker was a vice president at the Benton & Bowles agency when he helped develop "The Dick Van Dyke Show" for Procter & Gamble. There he met, and fell for, the young actress the whole country was about to fall in love with: Mary Tyler Moore.

Soon after the new CBS sitcom had begun its five-season run in fall 1961, Tinker returned to NBC, this time as vice president of West Coast programming.

Meanwhile, he and Moore became TV's golden couple and, in 1962, they wed.

Tinker stayed at NBC until 1967, after which he had brief stays at Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.

Then, with an itch to run his own shop, Tinker founded MTM and began developing its first series: a comedy to revive the flagging career of his wife.

The pilot for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" rated poorly with test audiences. The heroine was dismissed for being over 30 and unmarried. Neighbor Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) was deemed too annoying, best friend Rhoda (Valerie Harper) "too New Yorky and brassy (read: Jewish)," as Tinker wrote in his 1994 memoir, "Tinker in Television."

But the show, which premiered on CBS in fall 1970, was a critical and popular smash for seven seasons and became the flagship series of a studio whose mewing kitten (parodying the MGM lion) came to signify some of TV's best.

Along the way, MTM became an incubator for some of TV's best writers and producers, many of whom — like Steven Bochco, James L. Brooks and Tom Fontana — continue to excel in TV and films.

By 1981, Tinker's stewardship of MTM had ended (as had his marriage to Moore) when he returned to NBC, where, he recalled in his book, "the company had lost its credibility with every important constituency — affiliates, advertisers, the press, the general public and its own employees."

Under Tinker's regime, NBC enjoyed a remarkable recovery. "The Cosby Show" was an overnight hit, but thanks to Tinker, slow starters such as "Hill Street Blues" (which was from MTM), "Family Ties" and "Cheers" were allowed to find their audience and became hits, too.

Tinker left NBC in 1986, shortly after the announcement of its purchase by G.E.

He formed another independent studio, GTG Entertainment, in partnership with Gannett Newspaper Corporation, but its few series flopped and the company was dissolved.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...130-story.html

Michael "Jim" Delligatti - inventor of the Big Mac
 

Michael "Jim" Delligatti, who created McDonald's iconic Big Mac sandwich, died Monday. He was 98.

Delligatti invented the sandwich in 1967 at one of his McDonald’s franchise restaurants in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He decided that his customers would like to eat a larger sandwich. He was right, and the sandwich became hugely popular at all of his 48 locations.

Delligatti said he labored for two years to come up with the right combination for his "special sauce." The burger with two beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun was added to McDonald’s menu nationwide in 1968. McDonald’s has never changed the recipe for his Big Mac.

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I miss being able to eat Big Macs.

Don Calfa
 

Don Calfa, a prolific character actor who appeared in “Weekend at Bernie’s,” died Thursday, December 1, 2016, of natural causes in Palm Springs, California, according to The Associated Press. He was 76.

Calfa appeared in dozens of films and TV shows over the course of his more than 40-year career. One of the most successful was the 1989 comedy “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which he played Paulie the hitman.

Perhaps his most beloved role was as mortician Ernie Kaltenbrunner in the 1985 cult film “The Return of the Living Dead.” The horror-comedy helped to popularize the idea of zombies feeding on brains. Of all the roles he played, that one seemed to resonate the most with audiences and he made appearances at fan conventions for many years.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 3, 1939, Calfa dropped out of high school to join a theater workshop and pursue his love of acting. He got his first professional work on the New York stage, eventually appearing on Broadway in “Mating Dance” in 1965.

He made his screen debut for underground director Robert Downey, Sr. in “No More Excuses” (1968). He played small roles in the films of several notable directors, including Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” (1977), Blake Edwards’ “10” (1979), and Seven Spielberg’s “1941” (1979).

On television he appeared as a number of different characters over the run of “Barney Miller,” and had short recurring roles on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

Alice Drummond
 

Alice Drummond, a prolific character actress nominated for a Best Featured Actress Tony in 1970 and known for appearances in films like Awakenings, Synecdoche, New York, and Ghostbusters among many others died on November 30 from complications following a fall in her home. She was 88.

Born in 1928 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Drummond was a 1950 graduate of Pembroke College (now Brown University). She began her acting career following a move to New York with her husband, Paul Drummond whom she married in 1951. (The couple divorced in 1976). A regular on Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s, Drummond was nominated for a Tony for her performance in Murray Schisgal’s The Chinese.

Drummond also held a slew of memorable and sometimes iconic character roles on film and television. Among them, in the 1960s she appeared on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, in the role of Nurse Jackson; as a New York City librarian in the beginning of the original Ghostbusters; and as a a patient in the 1990 Robin Williams film Awakenings. She was a regular on the CBS soap Where the Heart Is, appearing on the show until it ended its run in 1973, and later appeared briefly on As the World Turns, another CBS soap.

Among many television guest spots, she appeared on Spin City, Boston Legal, Ed, Law & Order, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and Grace Under Fire.

Her most recent film appearance was in the family comedy Furry Vengeance in 2010.

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Wonderful and versatile actress.....and fellow native Rhode Islander.

John Glenn
 

John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth and went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, has died at the age of 95.

Born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, Glenn was a veteran of both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War. After Korea, he became a test pilot, and when the newly formed NASA began recruiting astronauts in 1958, Glenn applied and was selected as one of an elite corps of astronauts: the Mercury Seven, pioneers of U.S. space flight.

On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn became the third American in space and the first to orbit the Earth when he lifted off in Friendship 7. His observations of the journey fascinated watchers at home, particularly his description of "little specks, brilliant specks, floating around outside the capsule." When he returned from the five-hour spaceflight after touching down in the Atlantic Ocean, he was honored as a national hero, meeting President John F. Kennedy and riding in a New York City ticker-tape parade.

Glenn left NASA in 1964 and retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1965, aiming for a career in politics. His first campaign, running in 1964 for U.S. Senate as a Democrat to represent Ohio, was aborted early when he slipped and fell at home, sustaining a concussion. Glenn chose to withdraw from the race while he recovered. But when he ran again 10 years later, he was elected, and he went on to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate until his retirement in 1999.

Glenn sat on committees including the Committee on Governmental Affairs and the Special Committee on Aging, and he was the chief author of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law. He sought the Democratic nomination in the 1984 presidential election, polling in second place behind eventual nominee Walter Mondale.

As Glenn's political career drew to a close, he returned to space at age 77 in 1998, serving as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery. Glenn lobbied hard to be included in the mission, citing the important work that could be done to research the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on older adults.

In the years after his final space flight, Glenn founded the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at The Ohio State University, now known as the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. He taught at the school as an adjunct professor.

Glenn's many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Gold Medal and six Distinguished Flying Crosses. A number of schools and roads are named after him, as well as a U.S. Navy mobile landing platform ship. Before his death, he was the oldest living former U.S. senator.