Tag: Dead

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John J. Sweeney, Crusading Labor Chief, Is Useless at 86

John J. Sweeney, Crusading Labor Leader, Is Dead at 86

John J. Sweeney, a New York union researcher who climbed the height of the American labor movement in the 1990s and led the AFL-CIO through an era of dwindling union membership but increasing political influence, died Monday at his Bethesda home , Md. He was 86 years old.

Carolyn Bobb, an AFL-CIO spokeswoman, confirmed the death. She did not give the cause.

From 1995 to 2009, Mr. Sweeney served as president of the country’s largest trade union federation – 56 unions with 10 million members by the end of his term – and with thousands of volunteers, he strengthened the political forces of the work and helped elect Barack Obama to the 2008 presidency. Over the years, he also helped elect Democrats to seats in Congress, governorates, and state legislatures across the country.

Its more difficult task of revitalizing and diversifying the wavering labor movement itself had the weight of history against it.

For decades in the 20th century, work had not welcomed women, African American, Latinos, or Asian-Americans, and had often resorted to overtly discriminatory tactics to maintain white male dominance in the workplace. Significant but unequal gains have been made since the civil rights era in the 1960s, when unions began removing “whites only” clauses from their constitutions and statutes.

But Mr. Sweeney, still faced with one-sided demographics, planned a fundamental change. He cruised to bring women and minorities into the group, often in leadership positions; Alliances with civil rights groups, students, university professors and clergymen; and advocated low-wage workers, moving away from the AFL-CIO’s traditional emphasis on protecting the highest paid union jobs.

In Mr. Sweeney’s campaign for the federal presidency, Linda Chavez-Thompson, the daughter of a Texas stock trader, was his assistant to the newly created post of Executive Vice President. She was the first member of a minority to ever be elected to the top management positions of organized workers.

The 1995 vote itself was unique: it was the first election in the history of the Federation created in 1955 by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations after a long alienation.

An initiative signed by Sweeney encouraged the recruitment of thousands of immigrants into his unions. Many members have long been hostile to undocumented workers, accusing them of stealing union jobs and pulling down the wage scales. Mr Sweeney blamed such conversations as discriminatory and called for justice that included better treatment of underpaid immigrants and a path to illegal citizenship for those in the United States.

Critics claimed that Mr. Sweeney’s policies were anchored in a liberal past, employing mid-20th century civil rights and union strategies to organize 21st century internet literate workers. Mr Sweeney denied this claim, just as he had rejected companies moving jobs overseas and denounced the hostilities many young workers had expressed against old-line unions.

In a labor movement that had declined since 1979 when union membership peaked at 21 million, Mr Sweeney urged his unions to significantly increase spending on the organization. He often said that his first priority was to reverse the long slide and significantly expand the base of the labor.

By the time he resigned in 2009, his vision of a dramatic boom in union formation comparable to that of the late Depression of the 1930s and post-war 1940s had not materialized. In fact, America’s total union membership had dropped from 15 percent of the workforce to about 12 percent, a trend that has continued since then, according to the United States Labor Statistics Bureau.

“Given the optimism workers’ movement felt in his 1995 election, I find it hard not to be disappointed with the results,” Richard W. Hurd, professor of industrial relations at Cornell University, told The New York Times at the Year 2009. “How much of that you can attribute to John Sweeney is a whole other question.”

In an outgoing interview with The Times from his Washington office – looking across Lafayette Park to the White House, where he spoke to President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and more recently Mr Obama – Mr Sweeney was optimistic about The Big One The recession, which had lasted for over a year and had already resulted in thousands of layoffs, continued to win the union ranks.

“I think the recession will make people feel that they cannot solve their problems by themselves and that they have to take care of the organization,” he said. And discovering his father was a unionized New York bus driver, he learned a childhood lesson.

“Because of the union, my father got things like vacation days or an increase in wages,” he said. “But my mother, who worked as a domestic servant, had no one. At a young age I learned the difference between organized and independent workers. “

John Joseph Sweeney was born in the Bronx on May 5, 1934, to James and Agnes Sweeney, Irish Catholic immigrants whose struggles in America had shaped John’s social perception from an early age. The boy had accompanied his father to many union meetings where he learned of class and job differences, as well as union efforts to improve wages and working conditions.

He attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1952. When he grew up he decided to find a future in organized work. He worked as a gravedigger and doorman (and joined his first union) to pay his way through Iona College, a Catholic school in New Rochelle, NY, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956.

He worked briefly as an employee at IBM, but took a drastic wage cut to become a researcher at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Manhattan. He met Thomas R. Donahue, a union representative for the Building Union Employees International Union, Local 32B, who persuaded him in 1960 to join his union as a contract director. Mr. Sweeney would face Mr. Donahue 35 years later to run for the top worker position.

In 1962, Mr. Sweeney married Maureen Power, a schoolteacher. She survived him with their children John Jr. and Patricia Sweeney; two sisters, Cathy Hammill and Peggy King; and a granddaughter.

The construction workers union was one of the most progressive of its time, representing 40,000 porters, doormen, and maintenance workers in 5,000 commercial and residential buildings in New York City. The contracts guaranteed pay increases, health insurance, college scholarships for members’ children, and demands employers make and encourage employees regardless of race, creed, or color.

Mr. Sweeney rose through the ranks and was elected President of Local 32B of the renamed Service Employees International Union in 1976. Soon its 45,000 members struck thousands of buildings for 17 days and gained significant increases in wages and benefits. He later merged Local 32B with Local 32J, the caretaker, and again proposed contract improvements in 1979.

In 1980, he was elected president of the 625,000-member national SEIU and began moving his base to Washington with unions of public officials and office, healthcare and hospitality workers. He pushed for stricter federal health and safety laws and spent large amounts of money organizing new members. By 1995 it represented 1.1 million union members and was a national power in the labor movement.

Work was at a crossroads. Years of frustration with Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO president since 1979, stalled in a 1995 uprising by union presidents. Mr. Kirkland, whose internationalist vision of work had made him a hero of the Polish solidarity movement but left him unmoved, even hostile to proposed reforms for unions at home, was forced to resign.

In the 1995 election, Mr. Sweeney ran against Mr. Donahue, his old friend of Local 32B, who had risen to become Federation Treasurer and who appeared to be the heir to Mr. Kirkland. But Mr. Donahue’s ties to Mr. Kirkland forced him to defend the status quo, and Mr. Sweeney’s continuing demands for growth and change won the presidency with 57 percent of the delegates, representing 7.2 million members.

He was re-elected for four further terms of two to four years each, the last time in 2005 when he broke a promise not to remain in office beyond the age of 70. He retired in 2009 at the age of 75 and was succeeded by Richard L Trumka, his longtime secretary and treasurer and former president of the United Mine Workers.

In a statement posted on the AFL-CIO’s website on Monday, Mr Trumka said of Mr Sweeney: “He was led into unionism by his Catholic faith and not a single day went by meeting the needs of the work didn’t put people first. John viewed his leadership as a spiritual calling, a divine act of solidarity in a world plagued by distance and division. “

Mr. Sweeney wrote an essay titled “Retrospect, Progress: My Life in the American Labor Movement” (2017) and was the co-author of two books, America Needs Elevation: The Fight for Economic Security and Social Justice. (1996, with David Kusnet) and “Solutions for the New Workforce: Guidelines for a New Social Contract” (1989, with Karen Nussbaum).

In 2010, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. “He has revived the American labor movement,” Obama said at a ceremony in the White House. “He emphasized union organization and social justice and was a powerful advocate for American workers.”

Alex Traub contributed to the coverage.

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Entertainment

Hal Holbrook, Actor Who Channeled Mark Twain, Is Lifeless at 95

Hal Holbrook, Actor Who Channeled Mark Twain, Is Dead at 95

Hal Holbrook, who had a formidable acting career in television and film but achieved his greatest acclaim on the stage and embodied Mark Twain in all his rugged glory and vinegar wit in a one-man show around the world, died on Jan. January at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 95 years old.

His death was confirmed by his assistant Joyce Cohen on Monday evening.

Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful career as an actor. He was the shady patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); a painfully grandfather character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).

He played the 16th President himself on television in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 miniseries. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five won for his role in television films and miniseries. Others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), his protagonist, who resembles John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973), in which he played in 1968 the commander of a Navy intelligence boat confiscated from North Korea.

Mr. Holbrook appeared regularly on the 1980s television series “Designing Women”. He played Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”, Shakespeare’s Hotspur and King Lear and the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”.

Most of all, however, he was Mark Twain, who stood alone on stage in a crumpled white linen suit, filming an omnisciently sharp, succinct, and humane narrative of human comedy.

Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; in fact, he said, he had read little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of ​​reading Twain’s work staged came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to recognize that the idea actually came from Twain himself – or rather from Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as his stage name and had read his work for years.

Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright persuaded him to add Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife Ruby were planning to portray, entitled “Great Personalities”. including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty cheesy,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”

But Mr. Wright was committed to keeping him there, and in 1948 the character came along when the Holbrooks took to the streets with a touring production of Great Personalities.

They first tried the Twain sketch in front of an audience of psychiatric patients at the Chillicothe, Ohio Veterans Hospital – a circumstance that Mr. Holbrook only vaguely explained in his 2011 memoir “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.” In the sketch, Mr. Holbrook’s edgy Twain was interviewed by Ruby Holbrook:

“How old are they?”

“Nineteen in June.”

“Who do you consider the most remarkable man you have ever met?”

“George Washington.”

“But how could you have met George Washington when you were only nineteen?”

“If you know more about me than I do, what are you asking me about?”

The patients stared straight ahead – “Nobody was looking at us,” wrote Holbrook – and laughed at the laugh lines to prove that “the guys on the ward were more sensible than they looked” and that the material had legs.

The Twain play became her favorite sketch for the next four years as the couple crossed the country performing for school children, women’s clubs, students, and Rotarians.

Mr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked like this, in a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache, and a crumpled white linen suit like the one Twain himself wore on stage. His grandfather gave Mr. Holbrook an old pocket knife which he used to cut the ends of three cigars he had smoked during a performance (although he wasn’t sure if Twain had ever smoked on stage). He looked for people who claimed to have seen and heard of Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their memories.

He had more or less perfected the role by 1954 when he began a one-man show called “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.

Two years later he put his Twain on television and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. and “The Tonight Show”. In the meantime he had got a permanent job in 1954 in the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day”, in which he played a recovering alcoholic. The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring from roles that were no longer important to him, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.

At this point the metamorphosis was complete. Hal Holbrook, with his restless walk, Missouri Drawl, sly looks, and exquisite timing, had become Mark Twain in every way.

“After seeing and hearing him for five minutes,” wrote Arthur Gelb in the New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain or that Twain must have been one of the most adorable men to ever tour went.” Lecture tour. “

But to Mr. Holbrook, the Mark Twain figure he put on every night was a mask; Behind it, he wrote in his memoir, was a loneliness that plagued his early life when his parents abandoned him as a young child. As an adult he found his marriage, his fatherhood and even his stage life in an existential impasse in which “survival and suicide impulses work together”. His escape, he said, punished a lot of work, not to mention the company of friends like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

In his memoir, Mr. Holbrook described an emotional low point in the early 1950s. He was sitting in a hotel room at the end of a long day, still undecided about doing an All-Mark Twain show and feeling lost when he read “Tom Sawyer” for the first time since high school.

“You heard the voices right from the side,” he wrote. “That was a surprise, and after a while I began to feel good, and that was a surprise too. The bitterness subsided and a boy crowded in for him, his friends came in and his family, and it wasn’t long before I was no longer feeling lonely. Mark Twain had cheered me up. “

Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr. was born in Cleveland on February 17, 1925. He was 2 years old when his parents left him. His mother, the former Aileen Davenport, ran to join the chorus of the revue “Earl Carrolls Vanities”. Harold Sr. moved to California after leaving young Hal in the care of his grandparents in South Weymouth, Mass.

Young Mr. Holbrook spent his high school years at Culver Military Academy in Indiana and then enrolled in Denison for an acting degree. However, his training was interrupted by service as an army engineer during World War II. He was stationed in St. John’s, Newfoundland, for a while, where he joined an amateur theater company and met Ruby Elaine Johnston, who became his first wife. The couple returned to Denison after the war, and Mr. Holbrook soon became Mr. Wright’s prize student.

After becoming an established attraction in the United States, Mr. Holbrook took “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Europe, appearing in the UK, Germany and elsewhere. The German audience roared when he presented Twain’s view of the Wagner opera: “I went to Bayreuth and recorded ‘Parsifal’. I’ll never forget it. The first act lasted two hours and I enjoyed it despite the singing. “

Mr. Holbrook toured the country with the show several times a year, playing well over 2,000 performances. He gathered an estimated 15 hours of Twain’s writings to immerse himself in whenever his routine needed refreshing. He won a Tony Award in 1966 for his first Broadway run in “Mark Twain Tonight!”

Mr. Holbrook was 29 when he started playing Twain at 70; As he got older, he found that he needed less and less makeup to look older. He continued the action well after his 70th birthday and returned to Broadway at the age of 80 in 2005.

After playing Twain for more than six decades, he abruptly retired in 2017. “I know this long struggle to do a good job has to come to an end,” he wrote in a letter to the Oklahoma theater where he was to appear. “I served my profession and gave everything, heart and soul, as a committed actor can.”

Mr. Holbrook made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the short-lived “Do You Know the Milky Way?” He returned there in the musical “Man of La Mancha”, in Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” and other plays.

His numerous television appearances include “That Certain Summer” (1972), a groundbreaking film in which he appeared as a divorced man who eventually had to admit to his son that he had a gay lover (Martin Sheen). In the early 1990s he had a recurring role on the sitcom “Evening Shade”.

Mr. Holbrook’s many film roles were on the small side, though there were exceptions. One was as anonymous informant Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about the Watergate cover-up. (Deep Throat was later exposed as W. Mark Felt, a senior FBI officer.) Another major film role was in “The Firm” (1993), based on John Grisham’s corporate whodunit, in which Mr. Holbrook played the stop role played at-nothing head of a law firm in Memphis.

His Oscar-nominated appearance in “Into the Wild,” directed by Sean Penn, was as a retired soldier who encounters a young man in the desert in search of self-knowledge that would ultimately lead him into the Alaskan wilderness. His last film roles were in 2017, when he was 92 years old in episodes of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawaii Five-0”.

Mr. Holbrook’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to their daughter Victoria, they had a son, David. His second marriage to actress Carol Eve Rossen ended in divorce in 1979. They had a daughter, Eve. In 1984 he married actress Dixie Carter, who died in 2010.

He is survived by his children and two stepdaughters, Ginna Carter and Mary Dixie Carter; two grandchildren; and two bootlegs.

In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Mr Holbrook said he had the best guide possible: Twain himself.

“He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and being deployed on a platform,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. “You have to leave out a lot of adjectives.” The performer is an adjective. “

Richard Severo, Paul Vitello and William McDonald contributed to the coverage.

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Entertainment

The Official Strolling Useless Twitter Shuts Down Homophobic Followers

The Official Walking Dead Twitter Shuts Down Homophobic Fans

the Walking Dead wants people to know that there is no place for homophobia in fandom after comments have been made on characters by The Walking Dead: World Beyond. During the episode of January 25 of the Talk to me dead Podcast, TWD: world beyond Actor Jelani Alladin discussed LGBTQ + portrayal on the show along with Will’s relationship with Felico by Nico Tortorella.

Alladin’s comments were immediately greeted with hatred by homophobic fans. “I can’t enjoy gay male TV show characters. I’m sorry man, I can’t,” one commented on a YouTube clip of the episode. Others noted that the relationship looked forced, and one YouTube user replied, “I don’t like how every character just has to have a love interest. Oh, we can’t find a character for you, fuck it, you’re gay with it.” Man. Just stop. It’s so wrong just for added emotional drama. ”

the Walking DeadThe Twitter account wasted no time sharing support for Alladin. “If LGBTQ + signs on TV (or anywhere else) make you uncomfortable or angry, please don’t follow us,” the account said. “While we also encourage you to look inward and accept more, know that there is no place in our fandom for hateful discrimination or willful ignorance.” See the full tweet below as well as Alladin’s response.

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Entertainment

Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Useless at 101

Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101

“Suddenly the blacklist for the writer had reached what he had only been aiming for before,” joked Mr Bernstein in “Inside Out”. “It was deemed necessary.”

It was the now largely forgotten “This kind of woman” (1959) with Sophia Loren that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The director of the film was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name and thus effectively put him back into the ranks of the employees.

In the blacklisted years, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. His films include the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” “. (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the television game for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe “in 2000.

In addition to his wife, a literary agent, a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, survive in Bernstein from his first marriage to Marva Spelman, who was divorced. three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage to Judith Braun, who also divorced, as well as a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Silk.

Six decades later, Mr. Bernstein gave a warmly nostalgic look at the Red Scare era, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.

“I don’t know if it’s true that other people get older,” he said, “but in some ways I look back on that time with a certain fondness for relationships, support, and friendships. We helped each other during this time. And in a dog food dog store that was pretty rare. “

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World News

At Least 12 Lifeless in 2 Landslides in Indonesia

At Least 12 Dead in 2 Landslides in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Two landslides triggered by heavy rainfall and unstable soil killed at least 12 people in Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, and left rescue workers searching for survivors, disaster officials said Sunday.

Among those killed in the landslides in West Java province were the head of a local disaster relief agency and a captain of the Indonesian army who helped rescue those who survived the first landslide on Saturday afternoon. They were hit by a second landslide that evening.

The landslides also destroyed a bridge and separated several streets in the western Java village of Cihanjuang. The rescuers worked well into the night but urgently needed heavy machinery to move the earth and reach possible survivors.

“The first landslide was caused by heavy rainfall and unstable soil conditions,” said Raditya Jati, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. “Subsequent landslides occurred when officials were evacuating victims in the first landslide area.”

A woman whose family lives in the village, Dameria Sihombing, said her father, mother, nephew and niece were at home in the village at the time of the landslide. All four remain missing, she said by phone from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital about 90 miles northwest.

The first mudslide buried the family home, she said, and the second slide, larger than the first, buried it even deeper. Many spectators were also on the way to the second slide.

“A lot of people came to see the rescue team and suddenly the second landslide hit,” she said. “There were more casualties from the second because it was much bigger than the first landslide. My family is buried in the house and has not yet been found. “

Ms. Sihombing said her parents, both 60, moved to the village from Bandung, about an hour away, after retiring two years ago.

Many people were not in their homes at the time of the landslide because it was afternoon, she said. But her parents’ neighbors were also at home – a mother and three children. She didn’t know if their bodies had been found.

Fatal landslides are common in Indonesia, where deforestation and illegal small-scale gold mining often contribute to unstable soil conditions.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo warned in October that the country could experience more floods and landslides than usual due to the periodic weather pattern known as La Niña. The rainy season is expected to last until March.

“I want all of us to prepare for possible hydrometeorological disasters,” said the then president.

A local disaster officer said rescuers were still trying to determine how many people were missing until noon on Sunday. Eighteen people were reported as injured.

A video of the scene showed a river of mud plowed through a crowded neighborhood that appeared to crush and cover a number of buildings.

A video clip from the National Search and Rescue Agency scene showed rescuers working at night, lifting a body onto a stretcher and carrying it away.

Another showed a backhoe loader lifting a muddy van so rescuers could reach the ground below. The van said “Fight Virus” on the back.

The first landslide hit the village hours after a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea in heavy rain while taking off from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, killing all 62 on board.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands spanning the equator, was once covered by vast rainforests. But in the past half century, many forests have been burned and cut down to make way for palm plantations and other farmland.

Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world with 270 million inhabitants and Java, the most populous island, has more than 140 million people.

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Entertainment

Tanya Roberts, a Charlie’s Angel and a Bond Lady, Is Lifeless at 65

Tanya Roberts, a Charlie’s Angel and a Bond Girl, Is Dead at 65

Tanya Roberts, the breathless actress who became famous in the 1980s as a detective for “Charlie’s Angels” and as the brave earth scientist in the James Bond film “A View to a Kill”, died on Monday evening in Los Angeles. She was 65 years old.

Her death at Cedars Sinai Hospital was confirmed Tuesday by her companion Lance O’Brien. Her publicist, who received false information, announced her death to the news media early Monday, and some news organizations prematurely published obituary notices about her.

Publicist Mike Pingel said Ms. Roberts collapsed on December 24 after walking her dogs near her Hollywood Hills home and was plugged into a ventilator in the hospital. He did not provide the cause of death but said it was not related to Covid-19. He said she wasn’t noticeably ill before she collapsed.

Ms. Roberts’ big hiatus came in her mid-twenties when she followed the exploits of three attractive ex-cops who frequently fought crime on the fifth and final season of Charlie’s Angels, the ABC drama series that dealt with the sex appeal of its stars, wore shorts, low-cut blouses and even bikinis.

The show was an instant hit in 1976, but Farrah Fawcett, its breakout star, left the show after a season and was replaced by Cheryl Ladd. Kate Jackson quit in 1979 and her successor, Shelley Hack, was gone after just one season. Mrs. Roberts replaced Mrs. Hack. Jaclyn Smith appeared throughout the series run.

There were high hopes for Ms. Roberts as she joined the cast. Her character, Julie, had some of the streetwise demeanor of Ms. Jackson’s character; Julie was known to hit a gun straight out of the hand of a tough criminal. Her part couldn’t save the show’s falling ratings, but it did lead to an active decade for her in Hollywood.

Most importantly, she was a “Bond girl” who played a geologist threatened by a microchip monopoly (Christopher Walken) in “A View to a Kill” (1985), Roger Moore’s last appearance as Agent 007.

Ms. Roberts also appeared in “The Beastmaster” (1982), a fantasy film. And she played the title role in Sheena (1984), a highly acclaimed adventure film inspired by a comic book character of the Queen of the Jungle. Sheena, a Tarzan woman, wore skimpy fur outfits with a cleavage, rode a zebra, talked to animals and changed her shape. The film flopped at the box office and Ms. Roberts began to disappear from the public eye.

She returned to the limelight on the 1998 sitcom That ’70s Show as the glamorous young mom of a Midwestern teenager (Laura Prepon). In this role she was beautiful, slim and sexy – and delightfully dark. The comical puzzle was, year after year, how her chubby little husband, played by Don Stark with terrifyingly overgrown sideburns, had ever captured her heart. Ms. Roberts appeared on the show for three seasons and later made guest visits.

She was born Victoria Leigh Blum on October 15, 1955 in the Bronx, the second of two daughters of Oscar Maximilian Blum, a fountain pen salesman, and Dorothy Leigh (Smith) Blum. According to some sources, Tanya was her nickname. She spent her childhood in the Bronx and lived briefly in Canada after her parents divorced. She started her career by running away from home to become a model when she was 15.

Back in New York, she studied acting, appeared in a few off Broadway productions and worked as a model and dance teacher to make ends meet. Her modeling career included working for Clairol and Ultra-Brite toothpaste. She made her film debut in the horror thriller “The Last Victim” (1976) about a serial rapist-murderer.

After “Charlie’s Angels,” Ms. Roberts starred on both television and films. Her roles included private secretary Mike Hammer’s secretary in the television movie “Murder Me, Murder You” (1983), an undercover detective in a sex clinic in “Sins of Desire” (1993) and a talk radio host for the adult anthology series “Hot Line” “(1994-96). Her last screen appearance was in 2005 on the Showtime series “Barbershop”.

Even in her prime, Ms. Roberts did not seem to enjoy being interviewed. She chatted with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1981, laughing nervously, giving brief replies, and flirting with her fellow guest, Michael Landon. At one point, Mr. Carson mentioned a cover article about her in People magazine and asked Ed McMahon, the host’s pal, to suggest, “Maybe there is something in the magazine that would be interesting.”

Ms. Roberts was a teenager when she married in 1971, but the union was quickly broken at the urging of her new mother-in-law. In 1974 she met psychology student Barry Roberts while they were queuing up in a movie theater. They got married that year. Mr Roberts became a screenwriter and died in 2006 at the age of 60.

Besides Mr. O’Brien, she survives a sister, Barbara Chase, who was Timothy Leary’s fourth wife.

Ms. Roberts had always insisted that she was New York at heart, and not just because she hated driving.

“LA drives you crazy,” she said in the 1981 People magazine article. “I’m used to the weather and walking and people who say what they mean.”

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Entertainment

MF Doom, Masked Rapper With Intricate Rhymes, Is Useless at 49

MF Doom, Masked Rapper With Intricate Rhymes, Is Dead at 49

Daniel Dumile, the masked rapper who appeared as MF Doom and built a lasting underground fan base with his fancy pun and comic book personality, died on October 31, his family announced on Thursday. He was 49 years old.

The rapper’s record label, Rhymesayers, provided the statement, which was signed by Mr. Dumiles’ wife, Jasmine. The label did not specify the cause of death or the reason it was announced two months later.

Through six solo albums released between 1999 and 2009, and five joint LPs (with Madlib and Danger Mouse among others) between 2004 and 2018, Mr Dumile refined a style that was complicated and imaginative, drawing both esoteric and insignificant references to comic book Images in texts that could be touchingly emotional.

He was born in London and grew up on Long Island. He grew up in early hip hop. He made his debut in 1989 on the 3rd bass track “The Gas Face” with a stellar cameo that helped him get a record deal for his own group, KMD, in which he rapped as Zev Love X.

The act included his brother Dingilizwe, who went under the name DJ Subroc. His first album “Mr. Hood ”arrived in 1991 with the major label Elektra. Subroc was killed in a car accident while recording KMD’s second album, Black Bastards, and the label later declined to release the record. Mr. Dumile disappeared from the entertainment business but continued to work privately on music while raising his son.

In 1997 he reappeared with the single “Dead Bent”, his first song under the name Metal Face Doom. (The persona was a nod to Marvel villain Doctor Doom.) Around the time of the 1999 release of Operation: Doomsday, which featured a masked character on the cover, Mr. Dumile began to make his face in public to hide. first with a stocking mask and later with a metal mask that became his signature.

In a 2009 interview with The New Yorker, he said the mask became necessary when he made the jump from the studio to the stage. “I wanted to go on stage and talk without people thinking about the normal things people think about,” he said. “A picture always makes a first impression. But if there was a first impression, I might as well use it to control the story. So why not put on something like a mask? “

Mr. Dumile, once an underground cult figure, became better known with albums in the mid-1980s. “Madvillainy”, released in 2004 with producer Madlib, was a breakthrough.

“It delivers long, freely associative verse full of sideways jumps and unexpected twists,” wrote critic Kelefa Sanneh when reviewing a 2004 concert in the New York Times. “You think you know where it’s going and what each sentence will mean when it ends. Then it bends. “

On “Raid”, a track from “Madvillainy”, he rhymes:

Trippin ‘, to this day the Metal Fellow has rippin’ flows
Since New York plates were ghetto yellow
With broken blue font, that’s too exciting
People skip the show and really feel enlightened

His album “MM .. FOOD” (an anagram of his artist name), released in the same year, contained titles such as “Gumbo”, “Kon Queso” and “Kon Karne”. When he raped with stupidity and wit about the seemingly banal subject of food, he showed “respect for human life,” he told Spin in 2004.

“I’m more of a writer than a freestyler,” Dumile told The Chicago Tribune that same year. “I like to design my things and consider myself an author.”

Mr. Dumile was tapping under various roles and was later known for sending cheaters on stage to perform for fans. In his typical metal mask, it was difficult to tell the difference. The body often doubles up on disappointed fans, but sparked viral moments online when it was discovered that an obvious MF Doom appearance at a concert was comedian Hannibal Buress.

In 2017, Mr Dumile announced on social media that his son, King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile, had died at the age of 14. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Although he never reached the mainstream superstar, Mr. Dumile was widely admired by fellow fellow rappers and producers. He was “your favorite MCs MC,” wrote A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip on Twitter. In a post on Instagram El-P wrote: “Thanks for always keeping it weird and raw. You have inspired us all and always will. “

Caryn Ganz contributed to the coverage.

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Business

Nancye Radmin, Pioneer of Plus-Dimension Trend, Is Useless at 82

Nancye Radmin, Pioneer of Plus-Size Fashion, Is Dead at 82

Nancye Radmin, a plus-size fashion pioneer who ran an upscale chain of stores for two decades, the Forgotten Woman who served a group of women otherwise overlooked by high fashion, died at her home on December 8th in Lakeland She was 82 years old.

The death was confirmed by her son, Brett Radmin.

For most of her life, Ms. Radmin hovered around a size 8, preferring to wear fine fabrics like cashmere and jacquard. But by her second pregnancy in 1976, she had gained 80 pounds and was 16 years old. When looking for new clothes in her favorite Manhattan stores, she was shocked to find that there were only polyester pants and boxy sweaters her size.

“Fat,” she told Newsweek in 1991, “was the F-word of fashion.”

“There was absolutely nothing stylish available,” she added. “I just knew I wasn’t the only fat woman in New York.”

With $ 10,000 borrowed from her husband, Ms. Radmin wanted to start her own business – a boutique stocked with the kind of high quality clothing she wanted to wear.

In 1977 she opened Forgotten Woman at 888 Lexington Avenue on the fashionable Upper East Side. The name of the store was indicative of their clientele, women who wore sizes larger than most fashion designers – and perhaps a culture they overlooked.

Prices were high: a Searle Persian lamb faux fur coat was $ 595 and a dazzling pink silk Kip Kirkendall gown was $ 1,850.

By 1991, it had 25 stores across the country with annual sales of $ 40 million.

“People forget that the older and taller women usually lead elegant social lives,” she told the New York Times in 1983. “She is the mother of the bride, she goes to formal dinners with her successful husband, and she can remove pearls.” and bright colors that could flood a little woman. “

Plus sizes generally start at size 14, and today the average size of US women’s clothing is between 14 and 16. The plus size market for women was valued at $ 9.8 billion in 2019, according to market research firm Statista.

In the late 1970s, the concept of plus size fashion was an anomaly. Still, Ms. Radmin’s shop spoke directly to the emerging idea of ​​body acceptance, a product of the women’s liberation movement of that decade.

“If you look at the fashion history of taller women, it was either invisible or ghettoized or incredibly grumpy,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, professor of history at the New School in New York, in a telephone interview. “The Forgotten Women as a business for attractive, high-end plus-size clothing at the time was a radically integrative concept from the perspective of fat women who deserved to see themselves as feminine, fashionable people who deserved a shopping spree to make excursion. “

Ms. Radmin reached out to Seventh Avenue makers, many of whom referred to her as “Crazy Nancye”, to have some of her favorite plus size clothes made.

She also urged designers to create more plus size clothing. Some, like Oscar de la Renta, were a little convincing, but even he created evening dresses for their stores, as did Geoffrey Beene, Bob Mackie and Pauline Trigère.

In the Forgotten Women boutiques there was a “Sugar Daddy Bar” where the male companions of the female buyers could have fun. It was filled with basket champagne, tea sandwiches, and miniature muffins. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Roseanne Barr, Nell Carter and Tyne Daly have shopped there. Stores were strategically opened on shopping streets like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to show customers that they were just as authorized to spend money as their skinny counterparts.

“We wanted the customer to feel important and not embarrassed,” said Dane O’Neal, who worked in merchandising for the chain.

Nancye Jo Bullard was born on August 4, 1938 in Nashville to Joe and Jane (Johnson) Bullard. She grew up on her father’s farm in Cochran, Georgia, where he harvested peanuts and cotton. Her mother was a nurse.

Even as a child, Nancye was an entrepreneur, selling peanuts on the street corner to make extra money.

She attended Middle Georgia College (now Middle Georgia State University) but left to travel before graduating. She then worked as a secretary and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.

In 1967 she met Mack Radmin, a widower 23 years older who worked in the kosher meat business. She converted to Judaism for him (she grew up a Southern Baptist) and they married in 1968.

Ms. Radmin often called the early years of their marriage her “Barbie Doll Days” because she weighed 110 pounds, was a size 4, and spent a lot of time shopping and eating in Manhattan.

Mr. Radmin died in 1996. In addition to her son Brett, she survived another son, William Kyle Radmin; two sisters, Michelle Moody and Cheryle Janelli; and four grandchildren.

In 1989 Ms. Radmin sold part of the Forgotten Woman chain to venture capitalists. In 1998 the Forgotten Woman applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The remaining nine stores were closed by the end of the year.

By then, larger department stores had entered the plus-size market and started selling clothes in more sizes.

Frau Radmin didn’t think much of them. “I have no competition,” she told People magazine in 1988. “I only have copycats.”

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Business

Auctioning Off a Useless Mall

Auctioning Off a Dead Mall

PHOENIX – The body parts are surprising, even if you expect them to, when they are the only things that are left behind.

When a mall is closed – its stores are closed due to a recession, new spending habits, or a deadly virus – the mannequins sometimes stay. They are stripped and dismembered, their severed legs leaning against bare walls and severed hands thrown into abandoned back rooms. The mall has become a “dead mall” that has been stripped of people and their products.

But not everything is gone; There are still things that are nailed down, like counters and display cases, or scattered, like the fake body parts.

Before a dead mall can be reborn – renovated as a senior housing or office complex as developers recently attempted – these remains must be removed. And because shopping malls are temples of consumption, these items are increasingly being sold to the highest bidder.

Although this is a relatively new phenomenon, public liquidation auctions of shopping malls are becoming more common. The coronavirus has gutted retail sales, but malls were already in trouble. In the United States, 25 percent of closed malls (of which there are 1,200) could close in the next five years.

Two weeks ago the auction began in Phoenix in the empty Metrocenter mall, which was closed in June and will continue weekly until January. Until then, the auctioneers expect around 1,000 lots.

So far, her catalog contained a collection of 37 fire extinguishers (available for $ 140); a neon Wetzel pretzel sign ($ 750); a large mall ($ 275); A security system with cages so large that they can only be called multi-human size ($ 325). Upcoming items include 25 food court tables; the plexiglass containers that were used to keep sweets in a candy store; the contents of an empty Victoria’s Secret; many nine mannequin torsos (six women, three men).

While the majority of buyers at these auctions are surplus buyers and may be more interested in things like lights and racks, EJs Auction and Appraisal, who cleans up the Metrocenter, estimates that about 30 percent are collectors.

“There is a very, very strong market for signage: everything that is neon and retro, but also the newer products have value in the collector’s market,” said Erik Hoyer, CEO of the company.

When the Metrocenter opened in 1973, it was Arizona’s largest mall, a symbol of new prosperity in a suburban desert. Inside, families were skating on an ice rink; Outside, teenagers cruised around the parking lot (and were inspired to cruising again as adults – “one last cruise!” – when they heard the Metrocenter was closing).

Mr. Hoyer, 55, was one of those teenagers “who would cause trouble and do what teenagers did,” he said. “And so we knew that some of the articles would pique the interest of people my age. There’s a lot of nostalgia there. “

Updated

Apr. 16, 2020, 7:32 am ET

But it’s not nostalgia for individual malls attracting national interest in these auctions: like Omaha this fall; in Knoxville, Tenn., last December; or in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in 2015. It’s nostalgia for malls themselves.

Large communities have formed online to discover and document dead shopping malls. Groups of people gather to discuss them on Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook, fascinated by the emptiness and decay. Most of these enthusiasts are old enough to remember having spent part of their youth in a busy mall (so at least 30 years old).

Now they realize that they can own parts of the corpse.

In late 2019, Paul Shore placed a bid for a wooden bookcase to be used in the offices of the Knoxville Center Mall in suburban Tennessee. He couldn’t examine the shelves closely, but the disorganized selection of content was part of the deal. He won the lot for $ 60.

Later, when sorting the cargo, Mr. Shore kept all of the Mall brand souvenirs, including a box of pink nail files and individually wrapped hand mirrors. He kept several stuffed cow ornaments from Chick-fil-A and a map that was used in the mall office to mark sound system zones. His best find, however, was a series of laminated marketing posters advertising potential tenants to the mall.

“They were kind of unique,” he said.

In addition to the bookshelf, Mr. Shore won several other auction items: a large metal sign pointing to JC Penney ($ 29) and a collection of 30 Mall-branded cloth bags ($ 52). After collecting the last of his winnings in May, Mr. Shore drove back to his Georgia home for more than three hours.

Mr Shore, 35, said he was “intrigued” by abandoned retail spaces, which include shopping malls but also large stores like Kmart. Acquiring their memorabilia is just a more tangible version of what he does on his RetailWorld YouTube channel: collecting new and old footage that he hopes will hold some malls memories. (His last video about the Knoxville Mall was over 16 minutes long.)

“I only think for myself and other people I know they want the same thing. We want to hold onto this piece of history and have a memento or memory of things in the past from their previous glory,” he said. “To collect something to remember a past time and place.”

His nostalgia is rooted in his Florida childhood when his parents took him to the mall every Friday, he said. Today he tries to shop in malls whenever he can. “I don’t want malls to go away,” said Mr. Shore.

In some corridors of Metrocenter, the recently disbanded shopping mall in Phoenix, floors are covered in plastic BBs from a recent airsoft game that resembles paintball (with no paint) and simulates military combat. At an auction preview last week, little white balls crunched underfoot.

Somewhere in the mall a radio was playing the “linger” of the cranberries, which echoed eerily from the walls and stretched as far as possible over 1.3 million square meters. While most Metrocenter stores were stripped of anything but lights and displays (and those mannequins), their back rooms look searched as if they were quickly vacated.

Documents were thrown on the floor or left forgotten on a desk. Here was someone’s résumé: a 2014 graduate whose skills included self-motivation and graphic design. There was a letter from the corporate commission informing a jewelry store that its organizational item had been approved.

“It can be a little creepy out there,” said Mr. Hoyer. He recently watched “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” which was partially filmed at the Metrocenter, to see if he could see any devices that were still there. He could not. The mall has had too many lives. And deaths.

Erik Pierson, 39, a dead Arizona mall enthusiast, attended the first auction preview and plans to visit more visitors even though he has not yet placed a bid. Most of the time, he enjoyed the experience of seeing the mall in its final, eerie form.

“I went there as a kid and obviously covered it pretty extensively on my YouTube channel,” he said. “But that was the first time I’ve been there since it was closed. And it was bizarre. It was kind of bittersweet because I love this mall. “

Some people remember the ice rink. Others remember the huge fountain that put on timed shows, spitting water up and down, as high as the second floor, before crashing onto tiles with loud splashes. The well was covered years ago.

The mall’s ongoing closure has inspired people to share memories like this one almost endlessly. Everyone has a story about Metrocenter (or put the name of a local mall here). But stories don’t keep malls alive.

“I think a lot of people just forgot,” said Pierson, who predicts that more property owners will turn to auctions as closings accelerate. “And now it’s gone.”