Tim Conway
 

Tim Conway, whose gallery of innocent goofballs, stammering bystanders, transparent connivers, oblivious knuckleheads and hapless bumblers populated television comedy and variety shows for more than half a century, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 85.

With a sweetly cherubic face, a deceptively athletic physicality and an utter devotion to foolishness and slapstick, Mr. Conway was among Hollywood’s most enduringly popular clowns. The winner of six Emmy Awards and a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, he was a leading non-leading man, a vivid second banana whose deferential mien and skill as a collaborator made him most comfortable — and often funniest — in the shadow of a star.

For Mr. Conway, those stars were, most notably, Ernest Borgnine, with whom he appeared on the popular early-1960s series “McHale’s Navy,” and Carol Burnett, on whose comedy-variety show Mr. Conway was regularly featured from 1967 to 1978.

Obit

Architect IM Pei, best known for designing the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris, died early Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102

RIP Grumpy Cat (no nine lives, just seven)
 

https://d28mt5n9lkji5m.cloudfront.net/i/Vt0jeslbMi.png


http://www.clubhousenews.com/wp-cont...t-1024x745.jpg

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88. I will never forget her novel "The Bluest Eye", which, although it was not perhaps her most famous novel, had a deep affect on me.

Stacey Abrams tweeted, "Toni Morrison was a towering intellect, a brilliant scribe of our nation’s complex stories, a heartbreaking journalist of our deepest desires, and a groundbreaking author who destroyed precepts, walls and those who dared underestimate her capacity. Rest well and in peace."

I can't add anything to that, except I am profoundly saddened.

Beloved
 

Indeed!, a great loss - one of my favourite books - a difficult read for me, Beloved, which I loved, and had an enormous impact on my life, also became my favourite word, which I now use for only one.

She was such a profound influence on my life. I am so thankful for that. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to bed listing to her audio books that she read herself. Her voice soothing me to sleep. I wish I could be a fly on the wall at her services.Can you imagine? I've met Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. Both times I was scanning the crowd for Toni, thinking, she must be here somewhere, but I never laid eyes on her. Fly free, beautiful fierce spirit.

A Favorite Quote by Toni Morrison (Rest in Peace):


"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it,"~ Toni Morrison

Rhoda (of Mary Tyler Moore Fame)
 

Valerie Harper died today. (w)(w)(w)

She was Mary Tyler Moore's best friend on the TV show.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-p...-idUSKCN1VK2P0

I can't help but think of all the people who never stood a chance of making it through that horrible hurricane that devastated the Bahamas. So heart wrenching, the emerging stories of heartache experienced by those left behind. RIP, to all the loved ones who didn't make it through the hurricane, down in the Bahamas.



And, RIP Kylie Rae Harris... a young mother and aspiring Country Western singer from the heart of Texas. I read about her today and how her little girl is now parent-less. So sad. She wrote this song for her little girl, a few years ago. No doubt Kylie was a bright light on the horizon.

Cokie Roberts, broadcast journalism pioneer
 

Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69
 

Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69
By David E. Sanger and Neil Genzlinger

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/u...ion=Obituaries

He contradicted a statement in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. A week later, his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, was outed as a C.I.A. agent.

https://i.postimg.cc/cL0qDTR2/27-Wil...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in 2006 with his wife, the former C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame. Credit Lawrence Jackson/Associated Press

Joseph C. Wilson, the long-serving American diplomat who undercut President George W. Bush’s claim in 2003 that Iraq had been trying to build nuclear weapons, leading to the unmasking of his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 69.

Ms. Plame said the cause was organ failure.

Mr. Wilson’s decision to challenge Mr. Bush’s argument that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was secretly reconstituting his nuclear program changed both the narrative and the politics of the war. It forced the White House to concede, grudgingly, that Mr. Bush had built the case for the invasion of Iraq on a faulty intelligence report — one that critics said was cherry-picked to provide an urgent rationale for a war that quickly turned into a morass.

Mr. Wilson’s action ultimately created a rift between the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency and led to inquiries about whether intelligence had been politicized, a debate that racks Washington to this day. And the unmasking of Ms. Plame — who worked in the C.I.A. unit responsible for determining whether nations were building weapons of mass destruction — led to investigations and ultimately a trial for Vice President Dick Cheney’s top national security aide.

A big personality whom some found prickly and difficult, Mr. Wilson served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career that began in 1976. One posting was to Niger, and in 2002, by then a private citizen, he was asked by the C.I.A. to return to that country to try to verify reports that Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq in the 1990s. That material is essentially raw uranium that can be turned into nuclear fuel with considerable processing.

At the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with Iraq, and the key issue was whether Mr. Hussein had resumed his quest for nuclear weapons.

It was a legitimate question. After Mr. Hussein was defeated in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors found, and dismantled, what appeared to be an advanced program to develop nuclear weapons that Western intelligence agencies had missed.

But Mr. Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq deal were false. Nevertheless, in his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush declared that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later.

Soon after, the intelligence behind Mr. Bush’s “16 words” from the State of the Union speech was under attack. American military teams could find no evidence of an active nuclear program in Iraq.

Mr. Wilson felt that the record needed to be corrected. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” he argued that the intelligence had most likely been twisted to create a rationale for the invasion.

“If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why),” he wrote. “If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”


Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV recounted the story behind his New York Times Op-Ed from June 2003 and the series of events that followed its publication.

That challenge did not sit well with Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, who ripped the article out of the paper and began annotating it with questions, some of them wondering why a civilian had been sent by the C.I.A. to figure out what had happened. “Or did his wife send him on a junket?” Mr. Cheney wrote.

The White House story about how the language got into the speech — and why “British intelligence” was cited — began to shatter. The day after the Op-Ed article was published, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, was challenged by a Times reporter about how the 16 words had gotten into the speech.

“So it was wrong?" he was asked.

“That’s what we’ve acknowledged,” Mr. Fleischer said.

Only the White House had never acknowledged it, and his admission engulfed the Bush White House in a tide of criticism and led to years of investigations.

A week after the Op-Ed was published, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist with conservative leanings and Republican connections, wrote a column identifying Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. operative — a startling breach, since she had been under cover for much of her career.

Revealing a C.I.A. agent’s identity can be a crime, and an investigation into the leak led to charges against Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr. But Mr. Libby was not charged with leaking the information — it had come from a top State Department official who acknowledged that he was the source — but with lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with reporters.

After a long trial that involved testimony from a parade of administration officials, news editors and reporters, Mr. Libby was convicted. President Bush later commuted his 30-month prison sentence. Mr. Cheney, however, did not believe that commutation was enough. He insisted on a full pardon. The split on the issue contributed to a breach between the president and his vice president, and Mr. Cheney was increasingly marginalized in the administration’s second term.

Last year, President Trump issued Mr. Libby a full pardon.

Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame did not flee the spotlight once they had been thrust into it. They posed for photographs in a convertible parked near the White House. Their story was told in a 2010 movie, “Fair Game,” in which Mr. Wilson was played by Sean Penn and Ms. Plame by Naomi Watts.

For Mr. Wilson, the decision to write the Op-Ed article was a matter of patriotic duty.

“The path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own mind,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity.” “My government had refused to address the fundamental question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address.

“Time after time during the previous four months,” he continued, “from March to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order to defend us against the threat of the ‘mushroom cloud’ when they knew, as did I, that at least one of the two ‘facts’ underpinning the case was not a fact at all.”

In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Plame, whose marriage to Mr. Wilson ended in divorce this year, said he had never regretted writing the article.

“He did it because he felt it was his responsibility as a citizen,” she said. “It was not done out of partisan motivation, despite how it was spun.”

“He had the heart of a lion,” she added. “He’s an American hero.”

Joseph Charles Wilson IV was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Bridgeport, Conn., to Joseph Wilson III and Phyllis (Finnell) Wilson. Both parents were journalists, and young Joe had a colorful upbringing because of it.

“I had spent my high school years in Europe following my parents in their quixotic quest to be expatriate journalists and authors,” he wrote in his memoir. “We had first traveled to Europe in 1959, driving around in an old Citroën taxi that was low-slung like the gangster cars in old movies.”

That background was a foundation for his diplomatic career, but his first job on graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1971 was as a carpenter. Within a few years, though, he had taken the Foreign Service exam, and in 1976 he received his first posting, to Niamey, the capital of Niger.

He was there for two years. Then came assignments in Togo, South Africa, Burundi and elsewhere, including Iraq. There, from 1988 to 1991, a tense period that included Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he was deputy chief of mission, the No. 2 job in an embassy. He left in early 1991, just before the United States and its allies launched the military action known as Operation Desert Storm to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush named Mr. Wilson ambassador to two African countries, Gabon and the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, a post he held for three years. He finished his government service as senior director for African affairs for President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. He then started a consulting business.

https://i.postimg.cc/ydZsqxkb/merlin...uper-Jumbo.jpg

Mr. Wilson’s first marriage, to Susan Otchis, ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to Jacqueline Giorgi. He married Ms. Plame in 1998.

He is survived by a brother, William; two children from his first marriage, Joseph Wilson V and Sabrina Ames; two children from his marriage to Ms. Plame, Trevor and Samantha Wilson; and five grandchildren.

In his memoir, Mr. Wilson found a positive side to his and Ms. Plame’s experience.

“I come away from the fight I’ve had with my government full of hope for our future,” he wrote. “It takes time for Americans to fully understand when they have been duped by a government they instinctively want to trust. But it is axiomatic that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and our citizens inevitably react to the deceit.”

——————————
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic.

Diahann Carroll (RiP)
 

Robert Forster.....
 

~
Even tho he starred in many roles it's his performance as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, that will always remain my very favorite!

Ginger Baker 19 AUG 1939 - 6 OCT 2019
 

Drummer of the early rock group "Cream" which included Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, and Lenny Bruce.

Ginger Baker has long been considered the best rock drummer in the history of rock.
The second best rock drummer is the late John Bonham of "Led Zeppelin."

The most well known song of "Cream" is "The White Room."
"Cream" was active from 1966-1969, with single concerts in 2005 and 2006 for charity causes.

Mr. Baker was inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993.

He was raised in London, England. Began his musical career in 1956.

Ginger Baker will be sadly missed by Rock enthusiasts

Elijah E. Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68
 

Elijah E. Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68

A son of sharecroppers, he fought tirelessly for his hometown of Baltimore and became a key figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump.

https://i.postimg.cc/G3Y9tFtb/merlin...uper-Jumbo.jpgphoto uploader for website

By David Stout and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Oct. 17, 2019
Updated 6:23 a.m. ET

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a key figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, died on Thursday in Baltimore, his spokeswoman said. He was 68.

His death resulted from “complications concerning longstanding health challenges,” the spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, said in a statement, without elaborating on the cause.

As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Mr. Cummings, of Maryland, had sweeping power to investigate Mr. Trump and his administration — and he used it.

A critical ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Cummings spent his final months in Congress sparring with the president, calling Mr. Trump’s effort to block congressional lines of inquiry “far worse than Watergate.” He was sued by Mr. Trump as the president tried to keep his business records secret.

With his booming voice and a speaking cadence with hints of the pulpit, Mr. Cummings was a compelling figure on Capitol Hill. For more than two decades, he represented a section of Baltimore with more than its share of social problems. He campaigned tirelessly for stricter gun control laws and help for those addicted to drugs.

He grabbed the national spotlight in 2015 when he took to the streets of Baltimore, where, bullhorn in hand, he pleaded for calm after riots erupted in his neighborhood after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody. Hours earlier, Mr. Cummings had delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy.

In July, after Mr. Cummings attacked President Trump for the conditions seen in immigrant detention centers on the southern border, Mr. Trump struck back, calling the congressman’s district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Mr. Cummings vociferously defended his hometown.

Mr. Cummings had been ailing recently, and was sometimes seen using a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. He was away from Congress for nearly three months following heart surgery in the fall of 2017. Soon afterward, he was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what his office described as a bacterial infection in his knee.

A hulking, bear-like man, Mr. Cummings had served in Congress since winning a special election in 1996 to fill the seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Cummings’s Seventh District includes most of West Baltimore and suburbs west of the city, as well as Howard County.

Since his initial victory in 1996, Mr. Cummings had not been seriously challenged in either a primary or general election, according to The Almanac of American Politics. In 2003 and 2004, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was an early supporter of Barack Obama for president and was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s campaign in Maryland in 2008.

Elijah Eugene Cummings, the son of sharecroppers from South Carolina who moved north to improve prospects for themselves and their children, who would eventually number seven, was born in Baltimore on Jan. 18, 1951, and grew up in the city.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University in Washington, where he was student government president, with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing attorney while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African-American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro-tem.

https://i.postimg.cc/1znVKLmq/00-Cum...uper-Jumbo.jpg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/u...gtype=Homepage

RIP Don Imus age 79 ~ a very controversial radio & television personality ~ someone I used to listen and watch with my mom.

Inuit pop singer-songwriter Kelly Fraser, suicide at age 26

Inuit pop singer-songwriter Kelly Fraser, who garnered worldwide attention with her Inuktitut cover of Rihanna’s Diamonds, had been seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder before dying by suicide last week, according to her family.

Ms. Fraser’s mother, Theresa Angoo, and six siblings issued a joint statement on Monday saying she had taken her own life on Christmas Eve at the age of 26.

“Kelly suffered from PTSD for many years as a result of childhood traumas, racism and persistent cyber-bullying,” the statement said. “She was actively seeking help and spoke openly about her personal challenges online and through her journey."

On social media, Ms. Fraser proudly showed off clothing and jewellery by Inuit designers, and promoted other Inuit musicians and artists. She posted excitedly about traditional foods: caribou, seal eyeballs, mattak (whale skin and blubber), oatmeal with aqpik berries. But amid the cheery posts were also signs that she felt the weight of criticism.

“I face a ton of lateral violence and criticism and hate,” she wrote in a Dec. 15 Facebook post. “I need a strong support system. ... Just because I am well known doesn’t mean I deserve it.”

Charlie Angus, NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay, said Ms. Fraser’s death underscores the need for a national suicide prevention strategy.

“We lose so many young people in my region to suicide and they are treated as tragedies,” Mr. Angus said in an interview on Monday. “A tragedy is when someone gets hit by a bus crossing the street. When you see patterns that are preventable, where steps can be taken, that’s not a tragedy, that’s systemic negligence – the failure to act on the indicators of suicide, the need to put resources in place.”

Ms. Fraser was born in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, and was living in Winnipeg. She released her debut album, Isuma, in 2014; her 2017 sophomore effort, Sedna, was nominated for best Indigenous music album at the 2018 Juno Awards.

She sang and rapped in both English and Inuktitut and blended her cultural influences with those of contemporary pop. Most recently, she had been crowdfunding for her third album, Decolonize.

“Kelly was an incredibly kind person who gave so much of herself to help others. She was fiercely open with her fans in the hopes that sharing her struggles might help them know that they were not alone," her family said in Monday’s statement.

According to a biography posted on her website, Ms. Fraser experienced numerous personal struggles, including substance use and the loss of her father to suicide.

Inuit have among the highest suicide rates in the world; in 2017, the rate was 106 for every 100,000 people.

Terry Jones, one of the co-creators and star of British comedy Monty Python, has died aged 77 after suffering from a rare form of dementia.......

Sephen Fry:" Farewell, Terry Jones. The great foot has come down to stamp on you. My god what pleasure you gave, what untrammelled joy and delight. What a wonderful talent, heart and mind"

RIP Kobe Bryant :(

He died earlier this morning when the helicopter he was riding in, crashed into the side of a mountain, down in the greater metro area of Los Angeles.

He was 41. He and his wife just welcomed another baby into their family this past year. Such a terrible loss. Kobe Bryant was an awesome athlete.

Spartacus actor Kirk Douglas, who was one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, has died aged 103.

Neil Peart of Rush
 

I couldn't find this thread when I heard about Neil Peart's death. Peart was the drummer for the band Rush and their lyricist. Peart was 67. Peart died of glioblastoma on January 7, 2020. RIP Neil.......you will be greatly missed.

John Hensen......Jim Hensen's son
 

So sad he was only 48
https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment...k&_gsc=8qUsRdb

That's one thing I hope my family never has to go through, my children dying before their father and I, my grandchildren dying before my sons do.

Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA
 

https://i.postimg.cc/tTsn1JHt/Screen...0-09-11-AM.png

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

By Margalit Fox
Feb. 24, 2020, 10:14 a.m. ET


Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians.

But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.

In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

https://i.postimg.cc/NFDCCd5x/merlin...fb87-jumbo.jpg
Katherine Johnson, part of a small group of African-American women mathematicians who did crucial work at NASA, in 1966. Credit: NASA/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

A complete obituary will be published by the New York Times shortly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/s...nson-dead.html

Barbara Harris, First Woman Ordained an Episcopal Bishop, Dies at 89
 

Barbara Harris, First Woman Ordained an Episcopal Bishop, Dies at 89

Her groundbreaking election angered many conservatives. She even received death threats.

https://i.postimg.cc/ncxhsgPd/17-Har...uper-Jumbo.jpg
The Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boston in 1998. As a preacher she could electrify a congregation.Credit...Tom Herde/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

By Emily Brennan
March 17, 2020

The Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, who was the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States — indeed, in its parent body, the worldwide Anglican Communion — an election that caused a furor among conservatives, died on Friday in Lincoln, Mass., outside Boston. She was 89.

Her death, at a hospice, was confirmed in a statement by the bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, the Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates. He did not give a cause.

Ms. Harris served as suffragan, or assistant, bishop of the Massachusetts diocese from 1989 until her retirement in 2002, and in some ways she was an unlikely candidate for the role. She had neither a bachelor’s nor a seminary degree, and she was divorced — a profile that some critics said made her unfit for election, regardless of gender. Others feared that she was too progressive for the church.

An African-American, she went on to challenge the Episcopal hierarchy to open its doors wider to women as well as to black and gay people.

Her election in 1988 caused turmoil both in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion, an international family of 46 autonomous churches that includes the Church of England.

Some Episcopalians, objecting to her political views and theological stances, declared that they would not recognize her position and campaigned against her.

She even faced death threats. For her consecration as bishop, on Feb. 11, 1989, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, the Boston police offered her a bulletproof vest to wear. Ms. Harris declined.

Years later, in a 2002 interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, she shrugged off the furor. “Nobody can hate like Christians,” she said.

She often criticized the church as being too dogmatic — as worrying over the particulars of canon law instead of preaching inclusivity, a truer reflection of Christ’s teachings, she believed.

At a church service sponsored by an L.G.B.T. advocacy group, Integrity U.S.A., in 2009, Ms. Harris — who could electrify a congregation with her gravelly, stentorian voice — asked worshipers, “If indeed God, who doeth all things well, is the creator of all things, how can some things be more acceptable to the creator than others?”

She paused, as applause overtook her words, then continued, “If God is the creator of all persons, then how can some people be more acceptable to God than others?”

In a church whose parishioners have included about a quarter of American presidents and business titans like J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Ms. Harris pressed for the integration of historically segregated parishes — she was an early member of the Union of Black Episcopalians, founded in 1968 — and called for greater numbers of women in the clergy. In 2003 she supported the election of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the church.

His election dramatically widened a longstanding divide between theological liberals and conservatives at a time when the church was seeing Sunday attendance drop by 23 percent from 2000 to 2010. In 2009, conservatives who felt alienated from the church, chiefly over the ordination of gay people, founded a small rival denomination, the Anglican Church in North America.

The Episcopal Church was led by a woman, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, until 2015, when Michael B. Curry became the church’s first African-American presiding bishop. A majority of the Communion’s member churches now ordain women.

But in 1976, when the Episcopal Church decided to ordain women, it was only the third member church to do so. The Church of England did not allow women to become priests until 1992, and bishops not until 2014. The move upended centuries of tradition holding that bishops had to be male because they belonged to an unbroken line of successors of the 12 apostles, all of them men.

Several congregations withdrew from the church in part because of that decision.

https://i.postimg.cc/h4drry0W/merlin...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Ms. Harris during her consecration as an Episcopal bishop at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston in 1989. She was the first woman in the United States to be elevated to that position. Credit...Peter Southwick/Associated Press

Barbara Clementine Harris was born on June 12, 1930, in Philadelphia, the middle of three children. Her father, Walter Harris, was a steelworker, and her mother, Beatrice (Price) Harris, was an organist at the family’s parish, St. Barnabas Church. (It later merged with another parish, St. Luke’s.) Ms. Harris studied the piano, learning to play dozens of hymns by heart.

She is survived by her brother, Thomas. Her sister, Josephine White, died.

After graduating from Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948, Ms. Harris attended Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism and entered public relations, ultimately becoming a manager in 1968 for Sun Oil Co.

Active in civil rights, she traveled to Mississippi to register voters in 1964 and the next year marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

All the while she prepared herself for ordination, studying at Villanova University and the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield, England. When three retired Episcopal bishops at her parish, the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, ordained 11 women in 1974 — two years before the church had authorized such an action — Ms. Harris was the cross bearer in the procession.

Ms. Harris was ordained a priest in 1980, served at St. Augustine of Hippo Church, a small parish in Norristown, Pa., and was a prison chaplain. She reached a wider audience through her speaking and writing on behalf of racial justice and in opposition to apartheid in South Africa.

Writing in 1984 in The Witness, an Episcopal journal of which she was publisher, she said the church was wasting its energy debating the ordination of women.

“How typical of this church and the society it reflects to get its adrenaline flowing over nonissues like irregularity versus validity,” she wrote, “while real issues go unaddressed — justice, power, authority, shared mission and ministry and wholeness in the body of Christ.’’

The Rev. John P. Streit Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who served alongside Ms. Harris at the Cathedral of St. Paul, said social justice had been not just a sermon topic for Ms. Harris; it was the organizing principle of her work, he said, most apparent in her ministry to the homeless people around Boston Common.

“She connects with them, and they connect her,” he said — and not just because they knew that she, an inveterate smoker, could be hit up for a cigarette.

Mr. Streit recalled Ms. Harris once speaking of her confirmation ceremony at the historically black parish of St. Barnabas. The diocesan bishop, who was white, she remembered, wore Episcopal gloves to perform the rite. Though that practice was not unheard-of, it made her wonder whether the bishop had done so to avoid touching her and the other black children.

That episode stood in sharp contrast to how Bishop Harris confirmed children, Mr. Streit said. She would lay her bare hands on their heads, cup their cheeks and look them in the eyes.

Julia Carmel contributed reporting.

Kenny Rogers died at age 81 of natural causes . RIP

Alan Merrill, who wrote "I Love Rock and Roll" (which was made famous by Joan Jett) has died of COVID-19. He was 69 years old, and still playing shows up until just a few weeks ago.
--from BBC World News

RIP Bill Withers (Lean On Me, Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone)
 

Bill Withers passed today from heart complications.

He was in his early 80s.

(w)(w)(w)(w)(w)(w)(w)(w)

Harriet Glickman
 

Terrence McNally, playwright and screenwriter, and 4-time Tony Award winner, as well as the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award died from complications due to COVID-19 on March 24, 2020. He was also inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was responsible for works such as

• Love! Valour! Compassion!
• Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune
• Kiss of the Spider Woman
• Ragtime
• Master Class
• The Full Monty
• Catch Me If You Can

as well as many other plays, musicals, operas, films and TV shows.

McNally was an openly gay man throughout his career. He was 81 years old when he died.

I forget how I know this, but my two god-mothers were sisters and they attended a Presbyterian church for years, while their other family members attended an Episcopalian church.. Somewhere in there, during the time Barbara Harris was the first woman to be ordained by the Episcopalian church, my god-mother's said that they actually followed her ascent within that church and would talk about how members of their Presbyterian church were influenced by Barbara Harris: the way she spoke to then-current social and religious issues in her oratorical deliveries. I think they actually sat in on a service back east, when they came back from England and visited relatives on the east coast (this was back in the early 1990s).

In fact, my two elderly god-mothers would often recite the same phrase in the article you posted ( “If God is the creator of all persons, then how can some people be more acceptable to God than others?”).

I think Barbara Harris influenced them a lot, even though they were not Episcopalian.

Thanks for you post about a Barbara Harris, Orema.

Phyllis Lyon, one of the founding mothers of the Lesbian Movement, passed away at the age of 95 on April 9. Lyon, along with Del Martin, co-founded The Daughters of Bilitis, which was the first national lesbian group in the United States, although it began as just a secretive group of eight friends. Lyon and Martin became publicly known as lesbian activists, and with The Daughters of Bilitis published The Ladder, a lesbian magazine. Lyon was also an author and journalist. In 2008, Lyon and Martin married, becoming the first legally recognized gay union in California. (They were married by then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, now the governor of California.)

Del Martin passed away August 27, 2008.

Ruth B. Mandel
 

RIP Roy Horn ~ of Siegfried & Roy dies of the Coronavirus.

RIP "Little Richard" Richard Wayne Penniman ~ He brought us years of entertainment :) great songs that are legendary ~ rest well you must be exhausted !

RIP
 

ocean, I agree, Little Richard was and is one of my favorite entertainers. He was brilliant and talented and certainly different than "Doggy in the Window". I proudly bought one of his original vinyls then another, then another. I bought a movie with him at the beginning along with other stars. "The Girl Can't Help It". If you get a chance to see it all the original founders of rock and roll are in it and stars Jayne Mansfield, Marihka Hagartays daughter. My spelling is atrocious, sorry.