Tag: Dies

Categories
Business

David Newhouse, 65, Dies; His Paper Broke the Sandusky Story

David Newhouse, 65, Dies; His Paper Broke the Sandusky Story

David Newhouse, who, as editor of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, led to a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story that led to the conviction of Penn State assistant soccer coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually abusing boys and being fired led by Joe Paterno, the school’s once beloved head football coach, died Wednesday in a hospital in Hanover, NH. He was 65 years old.

The cause was complications from the leukemia, said his brother Mark.

Mr. Newhouse, a member of the powerful publishing family whose best-known media company is the Condé Nast division, ran a modest outpost in central Pennsylvania in the Newhouse Empire.

However, his small town newspaper gained national attention in March 2011 when a staff member, Sara Ganim, reported that a large jury was investigating Mr. Sandusky on allegations that he had “improperly assaulted a teenager.” The scandal heightened in November when Mr Sandusky was charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a period of 15 years.

This first article and nine others were cited by the Pulitzer Board of Directors in 2012 for “courageously exposing and appropriately treating the explosive sex scandal in Penn State.”

Ms. Ganim said that Mr. Newhouse encouraged her from the start to pursue the story further, even when she reported on the police strike in Harrisburg, about 90 minutes from Penn State campus.

“He was very good,” she said, “when he said,” OK, everyone from all the news organizations will be in the press conference, but what you should do is think about how you can move the story forward. “

Mr. Sandusky was eventually convicted of assaulting 10 boys on 45 counts. Mr Paterno, who was accused of doing too little to prevent Mr Sandusky from hunting boys, has been fired. And Penn State’s image and reputation was badly tarnished.

Cate Barron, who succeeded Mr. Newhouse as editor in 2012, said he had reminded the reporting team to continue to focus on Mr. Sandusky’s victims, the men who were raped as boys.

“It was a criminal story about victims,” ​​she said. “He was the beacon for that.”

During his 11 years with The Patriot-News, David Newhouse was drawn to journalism, “which gave voice to the voiceless,” said Ms. Barron, such as articles by investigative reporter Peter Shellem that resulted in the release of five wrongly convicted prisoners.

“To tell this whole truth to power, he believed it in his soul,” she said.

In November 2011, Mr. Newhouse wrote a column for his newspaper criticizing the New York Times for handling an article about one of Mr. Sandusky’s victims. In order to protect his identity, The Times referred to the person as Victim 1, as he was on the indictment. But Mr Newhouse said the article “was so detailed that, although they didn’t name him, Googling certain information on the profile would bring up the young man’s name in seconds.”

The Times editors defended the article, but Arthur S. Brisbane, the Times public editor at the time, disagreed. Although he acknowledged that certain details about victim 1 gave readers “a deeper understanding of the boy”, he asked, “Was that reason enough to involve them and compromise his privacy? I don’t think so.”

About a month after receiving the Pulitzer, Mr. Newhouse left The Patriot-News to become editor of the family-owned Advance Local and helped develop websites as the family’s newspapers became digital businesses.

David Anthony Newhouse was born on September 29, 1955 in Manhattan and grew up in Great Neck, Long Island and New Orleans. His father, Norman, was the editor of the Queens-based Long Island Press and later oversaw The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and other southern newspapers belonging to his family. Norman was a brother of Samuel I Newhouse, who started the family in publishing. David’s mother Alice (Gross) Newhouse was a housewife.

“We all adored our father,” said Mark Newhouse, executive vice president of newspapers at Advance Publications, in a telephone interview with his family. “We grew up thinking that it was best to be a newspaper man.”

However, David Newhouse originally took a different route. He graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1977 and earned a master’s degree in film production from Boston University in 1980 and a second master’s degree in education from Tufts University three years later

He owned a bookstore in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a children’s clothing store in Arlington, Massachusetts. He also taught English at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts before asking his family to find him a job with one of his newspapers.

He joined The Times of Trenton, New Jersey, in 1993 as a city reporter and rose to become business editor and assistant editor-in-chief before becoming editor-in-chief of The Patriot-News in 2001. In 2010 he was promoted to editor.

He was a strong voice in the editorial office of the newspaper; After Mr Sandusky was charged, Mr Newhouse strongly advocated the resignation of Mr Paterno and Graham Spanier, President of Penn State, for doing too little to stop Mr Sandusky. The editorial took up the entire front page.

Penn State fired both men on November 9, 2011, the day after the editorial was published.

Mr. Sandusky is serving a sentence of 30 to 60 years. Mr. Paterno died in 2012.

In addition to his brother Mark, Mr. Newhouse survived his wife Alice Stewart. his daughters Lily, Hope, Magdalena and Macrina Newhouse; two other brothers, Peter and Jonathan; a sister, Robyn Newhouse; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Katharine Call ended in divorce.

Categories
Business

Annmarie Reinhart Smith, Who Battled for Retail Staff, Dies at 61

Annmarie Reinhart Smith, Who Battled for Retail Workers, Dies at 61

This obituary is part of a series about people who died from the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Annmarie Reinhart Smith had worked for Toys “R” Us for nearly three decades when the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2017, which resulted in store closures and layoffs of 33,000 workers, including her. With no severance pay, she remained frustrated on a Facebook page called the Dead Giraffe Society, named after the business’s mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe.

A labor advocacy group that helped Toys “R” Us employees mobilize to seek compensation such as severance pay and back payments took note of this and recruited them.

Ms. Reinhart Smith was soon on Capitol Hill, prosecuting lawmakers, and meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Cory Booker, among others, to seek their assistance. She teamed up with other former employees to march around Manhattan in protest and shoulder a fake coffin on Geoffrey.

“It was the beginning of something we didn’t think would ever mean,” said Maryjane M. Williams, a friend and 20-year-old employee of Toys “R” Us, who joined the protests. She said, ‘What do we have to lose? Let’s go.'”

After months of public pressure campaigning against the private equity owners of Toys “R” Us, a $ 20 million hardship fund was set up for the laid-off workers. Ms. Reinhart Smith also became the lead plaintiff in a bankruptcy court class action lawsuit seeking fair compensation that raised an additional $ 2 million for former employees.

“She was our voice,” said Alison M. Paolillo, who worked with Ms. Reinhart Smith for a decade. “She fought for us.”

Ms. Reinhart Smith died in a Durham, NC hospital on February 17. She was 61 years old. The cause was Covid-19, said her family.

Annmarie Reinhart was born on June 11, 1959 in Levittown, NY, on Long Island. Her mother, Diane Patricia (Switzer) Reinhart, was a housewife who later worked in factory administration. Her father, William Louis Reinhart III, owned a flooring business. She was the oldest of her three children.

She attended Huntington High School and later the Agricultural and Technical College in Farmingdale, now Farmingdale State College. She had two sons, Brandon P. Smith and Jordan J. Smith, with longtime partner, Aaron J. Smith, whom she married in 2011.

Updated

March 6, 2021, 11:15 a.m. ET

She survived her husband and sons with a sister, Carleen P. Reinhart; a brother, William C. Reinhart IV; a half-brother, Kenny Johnson; two stepbrothers, Dean Malazzo and Paul Malazzo; and two grandchildren.

Reinhart Smith joined Toys “R” Us in 1988 as a cashier in Huntington. Over the next 29 years, she worked her way up to a variety of management positions at the chain in both Long Island and Durham, NC, where she and her husband moved in 2016.

A warm woman, proud of her Irish heritage (she had several green shamrocks tattooed on her right ankle), Mrs. Reinhart Smith watched children grow up year after year when they came into her shops. She also caught up with Ornery clients when she submitted an updated profile to The Progressive magazine, like one who had a Power Ranger character cast at her and left a scar on her forehead.

In 2005, private equity firms Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and real estate firm Vornado Realty Trust took control of the company in a leveraged buyout that left it with $ 5 billion in debt.

Terrysa Guerra, the political director of United For Respect, the group that recruited Ms. Reinhart Smith, credited her with helping Bain and KKR create the hardship fund. “People saw her as a leader and a trustworthy voice,” said Ms. Guerra.

On the Dead Giraffe Society’s Facebook page, people who once poked fun at Ms. Reinhart Smith’s seemingly futile struggle thanked her and the other union leaders for winning the payouts, even if a week or more of groceries was enough to pay a monthly rent.

While Ms. Reinhart Smith described the subsequent $ 2 million bankruptcy settlement as a “slap in the face,” the case was viewed as a precedent. Former Shopko and Art Van Furniture employees, both of whom recently filed for bankruptcy protection and closed them down, have since followed a similar playbook in the battle for hardship and severance pay, Ms. Guerra said.

Ms. Reinhart Smith continued to advocate workers – she helped organize workers at other retailers, urged Congress to pass a law called the Stop Wall Street Looting Act that targeted private equity, and advocated a minimum wage of 15 USD a.

“If she believed people were going to enter, she would just show up and be the spokesman, whether that person wanted it or not,” said Mr. Smith, her husband. “She was just that kind of person.”

She continued to work in retail, most recently at a Belk department store in Durham. Belk, who was also heavily burdened with debt following a leveraged buyout, filed for bankruptcy protection in February but quickly resurfaced after a financial restructuring.

Categories
Health

David Mintz, Whose Tofutti Made Bean Curd Cool, Dies at 89

David Mintz, Whose Tofutti Made Bean Curd Cool, Dies at 89

After graduating from Lubavitcher Yeshiva High School in Crown Heights, he attended Brooklyn College, briefly sold mink stoles and ran a bungalow colony in the Catskills, where he opened a deli.

After opening his Manhattan restaurant, he said in one of many versions of the story that “a Jewish hippie” introduced him to the potential of tofu. “The Book of Tofu” (1979) by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi became his new Bible.

Mr. Mintz’s first marriage ended in divorce (“Bean curd wasn’t exciting for them,” he told the Baltimore Jewish Times in 1984). In 1984 he married Rachel Avalagon, who died that year. He is survived by their son Ethan.

Mr. Mintz often took advice from Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, venerable leader of the Hasidic Lubavitcher movement, to whom he had been introduced by his brother Isaac Gershon Mintz. According to COLLive, an Orthodox news site, David Mintz wrote $ 1,000 checks daily to Rabbi Schneerson’s Philanthropy. (He was the founder of the Chabad Community of Tenafly.)

“Whenever I met with the Rebbe, I would mention what I was doing and he would say to me, ‘You must have faith. If you believe in God, you can do miracles, ”Mintz said in a 2013 interview with Jewish Educational Media.

In the late 1970s, he was forced to close Mintz’s Buffet, his restaurant on Third Avenue, because the block was demolished for the construction of Trump Plaza. When he was offered the opportunity to move his restaurant to the Upper West Side, he turned to Rabbi Schneerson for advice. The rabbi’s secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, called him back, remembered Mr. Mintz and said: “Get a pencil and paper and write it down. This is very important. “

Categories
Entertainment

Moufida Tlatli, Groundbreaker in Arab Movie, Dies at 78

Moufida Tlatli, Groundbreaker in Arab Film, Dies at 78

Moufida Tlatli, the Tunisian director whose film “The Silences of the Palace” was the first international hit for a filmmaker from the Arab world in 1994, died on February 7th in Tunis. She was 78 years old.

Her daughter Selima Chaffai said the cause was Covid-19.

“The Silences of the Palace”, which Ms. Tlatli co-directed and wrote with Nouri Bouzid, is set in the mid-1960s, but mainly consists of flashbacks to a decade before Tunisia gained independence from France.

The protagonist, a young woman named Alia (played by Hend Sabri), reflects the impotence of women in this earlier era, including her mother Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a servant in the palace of Tunisian princes. Alias ​​memories show that even in the more liberated milieu of her time she has not achieved real autonomy.

“Silences” won several international awards, including a special mention in the best debut feature category in Cannes, which makes Ms. Tlatli the first female Arab director to be honored by this film festival. It was shown at the New York Film Festival later that year. Caryn James of the New York Times called it “a fascinating and accomplished film” in her review.

In an interview, Hichem Ben Ammar, a Tunisian documentary filmmaker, said “Silences” was “the first Tunisian film to hit the American market”.

Its importance was particularly great for women in the generally patriarchal film industry of the Arab world, said Rasha Salti, programmer at Arab film festivals. Although “Silences” wasn’t the first full-length film made by an Arab woman, “it has a visibility that outshines the achievements of others,” she said.

Moufida Ben Slimane was born on August 4, 1942 in Sidi Bou Said, a suburb of Tunis. Her father Ahmed worked as a decorative painter and craftsman in the palaces of the Tunisian nobility. Her mother Mongia was a housewife. Moufida, one of six children, looked after her younger siblings. As a teenager, she spent nights at a local movie theater watching Indian and Egyptian dramas.

She grew up in a time of social reform under the Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, an advocate for women’s rights. In high school, Moufida’s philosophy teacher introduced her to the work of Ingmar Bergman and other European directors. In the mid-1960s she received a scholarship to the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. After graduating, she lived in France until 1972 and worked as a script supervisor.

In Tunisia, Ms. Tlatli was admired as a film editor and worked on classics of Arab cinema such as “Omar Gatlato” and “Halfaouine”. “Silences” was her debut as a director.

The theme of silence in the film is dramatized by the servant Khedija’s refusal to reveal her father’s identity to Alia. Alia never solves this riddle, but she sees a brutal reality: how her mother had quietly suffered from sexual ties to the two princes of the palace.

Silence is a hallmark of palace culture. During music lessons in the garden and at ballroom parties, aristocrats hold small talk and servants say nothing. Discretion means meekness. The same discretion, however, also veils the palace’s sexual violence and muzzles its victims. Servants learn to communicate with one another through grimaces or looks.

“All women follow the tradition of taboo, of silence, but the power of their looks is extraordinary,” said Ms. Tlatli in an interview with the British magazine Sight & Sound in 1995. “You had to get used to expressing yourself through their eyes.”

Ms. Tlatli discovered that this “culture of the indirect” was ideally suited to the medium of film.

“That’s why the camera is so amazing,” she said. “It is in complete harmony with this rather suppressed language. A camera is a bit smart and hidden. It’s there and can capture small details about something you’re trying to say. “

After “Silences”, Ms. Tlatli directed “The Season of Men” (2000), which also follows women of different generations who grapple with deeply rooted social customs. Her last film was “Nadia and Sarra” (2004).

In 2011, Ms. Tlatli was briefly Minister of Culture in the transitional government that took over Tunisia after the overthrow of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “She has respect not only as a filmmaker and film editor, but also because she was not co-opted by the system,” said Ms. Salti, the film programmer.

In addition to her daughter, Ms. Tlatli survives her husband Mohamed Tlatli, a businessman involved in oil and gas exploration. a son, Walid; and five grandchildren.

Ms. Tlatli was inspired to make her own film after giving birth to Walid and leaving him with her mother according to Tunisian tradition, even though her mother already looked after four of her own sons. Her mother had been a “quiet woman” for a long time, Ms. Tlatli told The Guardian in 2001, before developing Alzheimer’s disease and losing her voice.

Her mother’s life has become “unbearable, exhausting, suffocating”.

Ms. Tlatli spent seven years outside of the film raising her children and helping her mother. The experience made her feel that there were unexamined gaps between women of different generations, similar to the one she portrayed in “Silences” between mother and daughter.

“I wanted to speak to her and it was too late,” she said in 1995 of her mother. “I projected all of this onto my daughter and thought: Maybe she didn’t feel close to me. That gave me the urgency to do this film. “

Lilia Blaise contributed to reporting from Tunis.

Categories
Politics

Vernon Jordan, Civil Rights Chief and D.C. Energy Dealer, Dies at 85

Vernon Jordan, Civil Rights Leader and D.C. Power Broker, Dies at 85

After graduating from law school in 1960, he became a trainee lawyer with Donald Hollowell, who had a busy one-man civil rights practice in Atlanta. Mr. Jordan worked closely on the University of Georgia overturned case and was close to Charlayne Hunter (later the journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault), one of two young black plaintiffs admitted to court after winning. On the day of her first school visit, Mr. Jordan was photographed escorting her to campus, surrounded by a hostile crowd.

After the Georgia case, he served as the field director of the NAACP in Georgia. Because of his job, he had to travel the southeast regularly to oversee civil rights cases, large and small. He said he tried to follow a friend, vaunted director of the Mississippi bureau, Medgar Evers, who was later murdered.

He quickly became director of the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project and, in 1970, was appointed Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund. A year later, his friend Whitney Young, the leader of the Urban League, drowned on a trip to Lagos, Nigeria, and Mr Jordan was recruited to fill the unexpected position.

The National Urban League, the embodiment of the black establishment, brought Mr. Jordan to New York and exposed him to another world. The organization relied on a wide range of prominent citizens, both white and black, and was closely associated with American corporations. During his tenure, the group published a widely read annual report entitled “The State of Black America”.

While holding that post on a trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana in May 1980, he was in the company of a local Urban League executive Martha Coleman, a white woman, when a group of white teenagers sat in a car and passed them she mocked. Later, when Ms. Coleman fired him at his hotel, he was shot in the back by a man with a hunting rifle. Mr Jordan almost died on the operating table, had six operations and stayed in the hospital for 89 days.

Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed racist, was charged with the crime but acquitted in court, though he would later boast that he was the shooter. He was later convicted of other crimes, including the fatal shooting of two black joggers who ran with white women, and executed in Missouri in 2013.

Categories
Business

Loretta Whitfield, Whose Black Doll Was ‘Forward of Its Time,’ Dies at 79

Loretta Whitfield, Whose Black Doll Was ‘Ahead of Its Time,’ Dies at 79

In the early 1980s, Melvin Whitfield was working for a health nonprofit in West Africa when he realized: Few of the children he encountered had dolls, and the dolls he saw were modeled on white European faces and bodies.

Mr. Whitfield, who is Black, returned to Washington in 1983, around the time his friend Loretta Thomas fell into her own doll-inspired despair after trying to find a toy for her niece.

It was the culmination of the Cabbage Patch Kids madness, and toy stores were filled with their cherubic white faces; The few black dolls scattered among them had the same shape and features, but used brown fabric.

The Whitfields, who married in 1984, decided to come up with an alternative to the Cabbage Patch Kids. After three years of development and experimentation, they released Baby Whitney, one of the first realistic black mass dolls.

“The doll is the by-product of their collective aversion to an” endless parade of distorted, false and demonic images “of black children passed off as dolls,” reads a sheet on the back of the doll’s box.

There were other black dolls on the market that had similar pursuits for authenticity, but Baby Whitney stood out for its high quality and the attention to detail from the manufacturers.

“The Whitfields’ baby Whitney was ahead of its time in mass-producing a baby doll that was not just a white, brown-colored doll, but a doll that little black girls could really relate to,” said Debbie Behan Garrett, an expert on the history of black dolls said in an interview.

Ms. Whitfield, who died at her Washington home on December 27 at the age of 79 (a death not widely reported at the time), had a master’s degree in psychology and spent most of her career as a counselor from Howard University. It was this background, said her husband, that drove her passion for creating Baby Whitney.

“We felt it was necessary to take our money and work from scratch to create a real doll that would add to our culture,” said Whitfield, who died of his wife’s death from complications of Alzheimer’s disease confirmed in an interview. “We wanted to make a statement without using words.”

Loretta Mae Thomas was born on February 17, 1941 in Wellington, Kan. Her family moved to Washington after her father, Jesse, got a job as a clerk at the Pentagon. Her mother, Verna Mae (Hayden) Thomas, also worked for the federal government.

Loretta entered Eastern High School in 1954, the same year the Supreme Court overturned school segregation in Brown against Topeka Board of Education. Dolls played an important role in this case: Thurgood Marshall, the senior attorney, drew on research by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which showed that black children preferred white dolls – evidence that segregation taught them that being black is inferior .

She graduated Magna cum Laude from Howard University in 1962 and later received a Masters in Psychology from American University in Washington.

The Whitfields weren’t the only ones thinking of black dolls in the mid-1980s, said Fath Davis Ruffins, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on black consumer culture.

In 1968 Mattel began selling Christie, who was marketed to Barbie as a black girlfriend. In 1980, Kitty Black Perkins, one of the company’s few Black product designers, created the first Black Barbie with an Afro.

And by the late 1970s, Ms. Ruffins said, black artists had already started selling handcrafted black dolls with realistic features at markets and art fairs. Some other entrepreneurs had even sold mass-produced dolls like Baby Whitney.

But none had gone as far as the Whitfields. Rosalind Jeffries, a historian of African art who the Whitfields hired to sculpt the doll’s face, was based on the flat, disc-shaped heads of the Akuaba dolls of the Ashanti in West Africa. Baby Whitney’s eyes, lips and nails were hand painted and her outfits were designed by Mrs. Whitfield. Friends and neighbors helped paint and sew.

Mr. Whitfield worked full time on the dolls while Mrs. Whitfield continued her work as a consultant to Howard. She retired in 1999 as the director of the university’s educational counseling center. In addition to her husband, she survives a brother, Jesse Thomas.

The Whitfields, operating under the name Lomel Enterprises, made only 3,500 dolls in their decade and sold them mostly by mail order and gift shops.

Still, Baby Whitney was a hit. The Whitfields were regularly sold out and added various outfits to their range.

“We’ve had situations where adults came back to us and bought a second doll because they wouldn’t let their kids play with the first,” said Whitfield.

The doll was believed to be sufficiently lifelike that some of them were used as stunt dummies in an episode of Rescue 911 in 1989 in which infants were dropped from a burning apartment complex.

The Whitfields ceased production in the mid-1990s to take care of sick parents, Whitfield said. It didn’t help that their undercapitalized two-person operation required a tremendous amount of work, especially when they were negotiating with a manufacturer halfway around the world.

Even so, the Whitfields turned out to be pioneers: in the early 1990s, companies like Mattel made more color dolls, paying closer attention to their characteristics.

“Children identify with their dolls,” the Whitfields wrote on the sheet that came with the dolls, “and the dolls become their children and they become the parents of the dolls. You want the dolls to have a picture that the children can interact with in a loving way. “

Categories
Business

Fred Segal, Designer Who Commodified California Cool, Dies at 87

Fred Segal, Designer Who Commodified California Cool, Dies at 87

Fred Segal, whose fashion boutiques became a Los Angeles landmark selling figure-hugging jeans and chambray shirts to Bob Dylan, Farah Fawcett and the Beatles, died Thursday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87 years old.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said a spokeswoman for his family.

Mr. Segal became one of the best-known designers and retailers on the West Coast in the 1960s, shaping the image of Southern California fashion as airy, sexy and relaxed. His ivy-covered shop became a meeting place for fashionistas, Hollywood actors, and well-known artists and musicians. For tourists, it was often a sightseeing tour right next to Grauman’s Chinese theater and the Hollywood sign.

Recognition…Family photo

Mr. Segal opened his first shop in 1960. According to the company’s website, it was a 700-square-foot space on Santa Monica Boulevard that sold jeans, chambray shirts and pants, velvets, and flannels.

In 1961, Mr. Segal and his nephew, Ron Herman, opened a half-size store on Melrose Avenue, selling only jeans that they sold for $ 19.95 a pair – a price they were at the time when they were men was still practically unknown, was practically unknown was wearing suits and jeans that normally sold for $ 3 a pair.

“My concept was that people wanted to be comfortable, casual and sexy, so I thought it would work, and obviously it worked,” Segal said in a 2012 interview with Haute Living magazine.

People flocked to the store to buy the jeans, spurred on by celebrities like Jay Sebring, the barber who was one of the inspirations for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo, who wore tight, flared jeans and a fitted shirt he had bought from Mr. Segal. Mr. Segal’s customers soon included the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Diana Ross, as well as members of the Jackson Five and Jefferson Airplane.

“When I first came to LA in the late 1970s, everyone was talking about two things: Gucci bags and Fred Segal,” writer Pleasant Gehman told the New York Times in 2001.

His designs were characterized by fits that were unusual for the time. The trousers were cut for men to drop low on the hips, for example, and his stores also sold fitted French T-shirts and Danskin jerseys.

In addition to his designs, Mr. Segal was part of a small group of retailers at the time – others included Tommy Perse, Linda Dresner, and Joan Weinstein – who pioneered the concept of working closely with designers and matching the designers’ clothes in their stores sell, said Ikram Goldman, the owner of Chicago boutique Ikram.

“You had an exquisite eye,” said Ms. Goldman. “These are the people who discovered talent and brought it to light in ways that – before Instagram, before social media, before the news hit you – introduced collections you hadn’t seen before.”

In 2006, a New York Times reporter described Mr. Segal as “the outfitter of those Hollywood fantasies, selling uniforms of expensive shirts and impossibly thoughtful blue jeans and kitten heels to the city’s wealthy residents and celebrities.”

Frederick Mandel Segal was born in Chicago on August 16, 1933. His parents, David and Helen Segal, had multiple jobs, according to the family spokeswoman, and Mr. Segal grew up poor.

Mr. Segal never went to fashion school. He worked as a traveling shoe salesman and shone in Venice Beach – two jobs where he could watch people and develop a sense of what buyers wanted.

Tired of traveling, he decided to open his first shop in 1960.

Mr. Segal owed his early success to his ability to be honest with customers.

“I learned at a very young age that the non-competitive space has integrity,” Segal told Haute Living. “When I was selling to my customers in my store and they came to buy this or that, when they put on an outfit and asked for my advice, I would sometimes say, ‘Take this off, don’t even buy this, it would be ridiculous , you don’t even look good in it. ‘That is really deep honesty. You don’t find that in the store, you know? “

After all, there were Fred Segal stores in Taiwan and in Bern, the capital of Switzerland. In 2015, the brand opened a store in Tokyo that also included an on-site food truck selling Mexican street corn, shrimp on a roll, and hot dogs along with Coca-Cola and Corona.

The name Fred Segal became so popular that it was mentioned casually in films such as “Clueless” and “Legally Blonde”.

Mr. Segal is survived by his wife Tina; five children, Michael, Judy, Sharon, Nina, and Annie; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mike Ives contributed to the coverage and Jack Begg contributed to the research.

Categories
Entertainment

Raymond Cauchetier, Whose Digicam Caught the New Wave, Dies at 101

Raymond Cauchetier, Whose Camera Caught the New Wave, Dies at 101

Raymond Cauchetier was born on January 10, 1920 in Paris as the son of a piano teacher who raised the boy alone. He never knew his father, had no education beyond high school and kept the small hallway on the fifth floor where he was born for life.

It was near the Bois de Vincennes where a colonial exhibition opened in 1931 at the age of eleven. “Every evening I could see a faithful, brilliantly lit replica of the magnificent temple of Angkor Wat through the kitchen window,” he recalled. He dreamed of seeing Angkor Wat one day.

When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, he fled by bicycle and joined the resistance. In the French Air Force he was used as a combat photographer in Vietnam after the war. In 1951 he bought a Rolleiflex, a camera popular with war correspondents, and used it for most of his life. General Charles de Gaulle awarded him the Legion of Honor for his battlefield work.

After the end of the war in 1954, Mr. Cauchetier stayed and photographed people and landscapes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. His first photo book “Ciel de Guerre en Indochine” (“The Air War in Indochina”) sold 10,000 times. In 1956 the Smithsonian Institution organized an exhibition of his work “Faces of Vietnam” which was shown in museums and universities in the United States.

His childhood dream of visiting Angkor Wat was realized in 1957 when he created a collection of 3,000 photographs that critics consider priceless. It was handed over to Prime Minister Norodom Sihanouk and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.

Back in Paris and unable to find work as a photojournalist, he was hired to take photos for Photo-Romans, a popular type of photo novel. He met Mr. Godard through a publisher and soon immersed himself in the New Wave. When he showed up, he and his Japanese wife Kaoru traveled widely photographing Romanesque sculptures in church settings. She survived him.

Categories
Business

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Former Saudi Oil Minister, Dies at 90

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Former Saudi Oil Minister, Dies at 90

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia’s powerful oil minister and architect of the Arab world’s aspiration to control its own energy resources in the 1970s and later influence oil production, fuel prices and international affairs, died in London. He was 90 years old.

His death was announced on Tuesday on Saudi state television.

In a time of turbulent energy policy Mr. Yamani, a Harvard trained attorney, spoke on a world stage for Arab oil producers as the industry weathered Arab-Israeli wars, a revolution in Iran, and mounting pain. The global demand for oil brought the governments of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states into areas of unimaginable wealth. He crossed Europe, Asia, and America to advance Arab oil interests, met government leaders, went on television, and became widely known. In a flowing Arabic robe or a Savile Row suit speaking English or French, he spread cultures, loved European classical music, and wrote Arabic poetry.

Mr. Yamani sought price stability and orderly markets in general, but is best known for imposing a 1973 oil embargo that led to rising world market prices, gasoline shortages and the search for smaller cars, renewable energy sources and independence from Arab oil.

As Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986 Mr. Yamani was the most powerful citizen in a kingdom that owned some of the largest oil reserves in the world. For almost 25 years he was also the dominant official of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose rising and falling production quotas flew like tides through world markets.

In 1972 Mr. Yamani took control of the vast oil reserves in the Gulf of Aramco, the consortium of four American oil companies that had long exploited them. While Arab leaders called for the nationalization of Aramco – a takeover that might have cost US technical and marketing expertise and capital – Mr Yamani adopted a more moderate strategy.

As part of the landmark shareholding agreement negotiated by Mr. Yamani, Saudi Arabia received the right to acquire 25 percent of the foreign concessions immediately and to gradually increase its stake to a majority stake. Aramco continued its concessions and benefited from the extraction, refining and marketing of the oil, despite paying significantly higher fees to the Saudi government.

The deal kept the flow of oil in a dependent industrialized world and gave Arab oil producers time to develop their own technical and marketing expertise. These developments ultimately brought enormous prosperity to the Gulf States and a drastic shift in economic and political power in the region.

In 1973, after Israel defeated Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War and Arab leaders demanded the use of oil as a political weapon, Mr Yamani embargoed to pressure the United States and other allies to support Israel and withdraw for Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab countries. The embargo sent shock waves around the world, ripping the North Atlantic alliance, and leaning Japan and other nations toward the Arabs.

But the United States held the line. President Richard M. Nixon created an energy tsar. Gasoline rationing and price controls were introduced. There were long lines and the occasional pump fight. While inflation persisted for years, there was a new focus on energy exploration and conservation, including a temporary national speed limit of 55 mph on highways.

Mr. Yamani, a tall man with thoughtful eyes and a Van Dyke goatee, found Westerners amiable, cunning, and tenacious.

“He speaks softly and never hits the table,” an American oil manager told the New York Times. “When the discussions get hot, he becomes more patient. In the end, he asserts himself with a seemingly sweet sensibility, but which is a kind of tenacity. “

In 1975, Mr. Yamani had two brushes by force. His patron, King Faisal, was murdered by a royal nephew in Riyadh. Nine months later, he and other OPEC ministers were taken hostage by terrorists led by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal.

For years after the embargo, Mr Yamani struggled to curb oil prices, believing the long-term Saudi interest was to extend global dependence on affordable oil. However, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 sparked an energy crisis. Iranian production collapsed, prices rose, panic buying set in, increased OPEC shares flooded the market and prices fell again.

In 1986, after a persistent global oil glut and disagreement between Mr. Yamani and the royal family over quotas and prices, King Fahd dismissed the oil minister and ended his 24 years as Saudi Arabia’s most famous nonroyal.

Ahmed Zaki Yamani was born on June 30, 1930 in Mecca, the holy pilgrimage city of Islam, as one of three children of the Islamic judge Hassan Yamani. The family name comes from Yemen, the land of his ancestors. The boy was pious and got up early to pray in front of school. He was sent abroad for higher education and graduated from King Fuad I University in Cairo in 1951. New York University in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1956.

He and Laila Sulleiman Faidhi was married in 1955 and had three children. His second wife was Tamam al-Anbar; They were married in 1975 and had five children.

In 1958, the royal family hired him to advise Crown Prince Faisal, and his rise was rapid. In one year he was Minister of State without portfolio and until 1962 Minister of Oil. In 1963, Yamani and Aramco jointly founded a Saudi petroleum and minerals college to teach Arab students about the oil industry.

After his discharge as Minister of Oil, Mr. Yamani became a consultant, entrepreneur and investor and settled in Crans-sur-Sierre, Switzerland. In 1982 he moved to other financiers at Investcorp, a Bahrain-based private equity firm. In 1990 he founded the Center for Global Energy Research, a market analysis group in London. A biography, “Yamani: The Inside Story” by Jeffrey Robinson, was published in 1989.

Ben Hubbard contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Entertainment

Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Vast Data and Wit, Dies at 84

Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

Peter G. Davis, who was considered one of the leading critics of American classical music for over 30 years with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on February 13th. He was 84 years old.

His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.

First as a critic for the New York Times and later for New York Magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, astute reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, a bond he developed in his early teenage years .

He presided over the field during New York’s blessing years of the 1960s and 1970s, when gigs were plentiful, tickets were relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career were the fodder for cocktail parties and post-concert dinners to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, which often got five or more reviews a week.

He wrote these reviews with a knowing, dead, sometimes world-weary tone. During a concert by Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov in 1976, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb on the stage and splashed Mr. Spivakov and his companion. Mr Davis wrote, “Terrorists need to be extremely insensitive to music because throwing color to a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply bad timing.”

He held onto the traditions of classical music not to keep the past alive but to keep its inner strength, and looked askance at those who tried to update it just to be trendy.

In a nineteenth-century review by French composer Daniel Francois Auber of the Bronx Opera’s 1977 production of Fra Diavolo, he condemned what he saw as “a refusal to believe in the piece by doing it treated as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directing gimmicks if the audience is to stay interested. “

He might equally disapprove of new music and composers whom he thought were overly hyped. Minimalist composers Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early “a reliable, hardworking, but not particularly notable soprano” who only became a star after her talents peaked) were regular targets.

Looking back at a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much the same as usual: the same silly syncopation and jigging ostinatas, the same crazy little tunes on their way to nowhere. the same awkward orchestral climaxes. “

That’s not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary – he advocated for young composers and emerging regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assessing the performance before him on his own terms and at the same time keeping a skeptical eye on gimmicks.

“He was a vocalist with unquestionable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former Newsday classical music critic who now writes on classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He felt that the things that were important to him were important, that they weren’t a niche, not just entertainment, but that they were at the heart of American culture.”

Peter Graffam Davis was born on May 3, 1936 in Concord, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother Susan (Graffam) Davis was a housewife.

Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.

Mr. Davis fell in love with the opera as a teenager, built a record collection at home, and attended performances in Boston. In the months leading up to his junior year at Harvard, he toured European summer music festivals – Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.

He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still shaped by longstanding traditions and had yet to emerge fully from the destruction of World War II, but a new generation of performers emerged from the rubble: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenor Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis needed to see her up close.

He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a Stuttgart Conservatory, he moved to New York to do a Masters in Composition from Columbia University.

Mr. Davis wrote a number of his own musical works in the early 1960s, including the opera “Zoe” and two operettas in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he decided that his future was not to write music, but to write about it. He has become a classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines and a New York music correspondent for The Times of London.

He began writing freelance articles for the New York Times in 1967 and was hired as Sunday’s music editor in 1974, a job that enabled him to add articles to his almost daily edition of reviews – whether it be recordings, concerts, or countless debut evenings which he commissioned from other authors. “He had a great memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Everything you threw at him he could discuss precisely and intelligently.”

Mr. Davis moved to New York Magazine in 1981. There he could select his reviews and occasionally step back to survey the classical music landscape.

Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.

As early as 1980, Mr. Davis lamented the future of opera singing, blaming talent and hard work as well as a star system that pushed promising but immature singers to their physical limits for “good looks and easy adaptability.”

The diminished position of classical music in American culture he documented spared no critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He returned to freelance work for The Times, writing regularly for Opera News and Musical America.

Despite all of his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his 1997 book, The American Opera Singer, an exhaustive, exciting, and often withered story in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American artists while recording many of them Task of being superficial workhorses.

“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more about the state of opera in America,” wrote critic Terry Teachout in his review of the book for The Times. “If you want to know what’s wrong with American singing, you’ll find the answers here.”