The RIP Famous Person Thread

[Sumocakewalk]

R.I.P. Eli. A one of a kind and great character actor.

[Gravesend Dave]

Fond memories RIP Bandid

Had some great lines Tuco

One Bastard comes in, another comes out!

[Latindancer]

Wow...he had a good innings ! And his looks sure changed as he got older. Wouldn't have recognized him at all....


https://www.google.com.au/search?q=E...movies&imgrc=_

[FloridaBorn]

'Indiana Jones' Stuntman Terry Richards Dies at 81



by Patrick Brzeski

In his most memorable screen moment, Terry Richards played the Cairo Swordsman in the first Indiana Jones movie, giving an intimidatingly skillful sword display before being shot dead by a smirking Harrison Ford.

During the course of his five-decade career, Richards also battled four different 007s in nine separate James Bond films.

https://www.yahoo.com/movies/indiana...872592282.html

[Gravesend Dave]

Thought Indie was a white man

[Gravesend Dave]

Sorry gents jumped the gun there.

RIP Mr Terry Richards,cracking make up!

[FloridaBorn]

Plus that's not actually Indy, he was one of Indy's nemesis in the first movie, "Indy" was
Harrison Fords character.

[Mr Lick]

R.I.P. Eli. A one of a kind and great character actor.

One of the greatest western villians, especially as 'Ugly' in the GBU. Brilliant innings Eli, time for a well earned rest leaving behind some very fond memories.

[harrybarracuda]

NEW YORK – Bobby Womack, a colorful and highly influential R&B singer-songwriter who influenced artists from the Rolling Stones to Damon Albarn, has died. He was 70.



Womack’s publicist, Sonya Kolowrat, said Friday that the singer had died, but she could provide no other details.

Womack was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years ago and overcame addiction and multiple health issues, including prostate cancer, to pull off a second act in his career.

Womack performed recently at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and seemed in good health and spirits. He had been scheduled to perform at multiple events across Europe in July and August.

He told the BBC in 2013 the Alzheimer’s diagnosis came after he began having difficulty remembering his songs and the names of people he had worked with — and there have been many.

The soul singer cut a wide path through the music business as a performer and songwriter in a career that spanned seven decades. Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, long after he’d lost his fortune and his career to addiction.

He spoke of kicking his substance abuse problems in a 2012 interview and all the friends he’d lost to drugs over the years.

“I think the biggest move for me was to get away from the drug scene,” Womack said. “It wasn’t easy. It was hard because everybody I knew did drugs. . . . They didn’t know when to turn it off. So for me looking at Wilson Pickett, close friends of mine, Sly Stone, Jim Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and I can go on and on and on, and I say all of them died because of drugs.”

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website, Womack was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and sang gospel music at a young age, performing with his brothers in The Womack Brothers. Under the influence of gospel and R&B legend Sam Cooke, who signed the group to his personal label, Womack moved into secular music. In the early 1960s his group recorded “It’s All Over Now,” which was covered and by the Stones and became the band’s first No. 1 hit.

His songs have been recorded by multiple artists, and he played as a session musician in Memphis in the 1960s.

Albarn and XL Recordings President Richard Russell helped Womack regain his career with 2012 comeback album “The Bravest Man in the Universe.” The album was a departure for Womack, full of electronic music and beats. But it was lauded by critics for a simple reason: That distinctive voice of his still brought chills.

“I don’t think he ever really thought that he would do anything again,” Albarn said of Womack in March. “Watching his rehabilitation and watching his ability to confront new material and new challenges was nothing short of miraculous at the time, and he still today continues to battle his demons and his illness. But he’s a beautiful person and when he opens his mouth and that voice comes out, it is something that is somehow touched by God.”

[harrybarracuda]

'Designing Women' Star Meshach Taylor Dies at 67

11:01 AM PST 06/28/2014 by Mike Barnes



Meshach Taylor, who played the lovable assistant Anthony Bouvier, who worked at the Sugarbaker interior design firm in the CBS hit sitcom Designing Women, has died, his agent Dede Binder confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. He was 67.

Taylor, who immediately segued to another CBS comedy, Dave's World, when Designing Women was canceled, died Saturday night at his family's home in Altadena, where he was receiving hospice care.

Earlier, his family posted a note on his Facebook page, saying, "It is with love and gratitude that we sorrowfully announce that our darling, amazingly brilliant and dynamic Meshach, the incredible father, husband, son and friend, has begun his grand transition."

Taylor also played flamboyant window dresser Hollywood Montrose in the 1987 box office hit Mannequin and its 1991 sequel.

Designing Women, created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, aired on CBS for seven seasons from September 1986 until May 1993. It starred Dixie Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts, Jean Smart and Taylor, whose characters work at the design firm in Atlanta.

The series usually aired on Monday nights and, paired with Murphy Brown, another female-centric sitcom, gave CBS an hour of solid ratings.

Taylor's Anthony, before he arrived at Sugarbaker Designs, was falsely convicted of a robbery. Toward the end of the series, he became a partner in the firm and earned a law degree. Taylor received an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy in 1989.

"I miss that character," he said in a 2001 interview. "I miss the situations he got himself into. I miss his vulnerability. That's what's so nice about playing that character — he really did care for these people so much he was very vulnerable because of his feelings, especially Suzanne (Burke) and the situations she would always involve him in."

After Designing Women wrapped, Taylor quickly landed a gig on Dave's World, a sitcom based on the life of the entertaining Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. Taylor played plastic surgeon Sheldon Baylor, the neighbor and high school best friend of Barry (Harry Anderson), in the show that lasted four seasons.

Earlier, Taylor was a regular on the 1983-84 NBC sitcom Buffalo Bill, which starred Dabney Coleman as an egotistical daytime TV talk show host in Buffalo, N.Y. And later, he played Principal Alistar Wright on the Nickelodeon series Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.

He most recently appeared in a pair of episodes this year of CBS' Criminal Minds.

The genial Taylor also hosted his own series on HGTV, The Urban Gardener; co-hosted a show on Retirement Living TV with Florence Henderson; and was a regular celebrity panelist on a reboot of the game show To Tell the Truth.

Taylor's TV resume also includes Lou Grant, M*A*S*H, Cagney & Lacey, The Golden Girls, Hill Street Blues, The Drew Carey Show and The Unit, and he reprised the role of Anthony in a 1995 episode of Bloodworth-Thomason's Women of the House sitcom, also starring Burke.

Taylor also appeared in such other films as Damien: Omen II (1978), The Howling (1981) and Tranced (2010).

Taylor was born in Boston, raised in New Orleans and attended Florida A&M in in Tallahassee, Fla. He joined the Organic Theatre group in Chicago, where he worked with Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz, and also became a player with Chicago's famed Goodman Theatre.

Smart, Burke, Gerald McRaney, Mantegna, Franz, Shadoe Stevens and Ernie Hudson were among those who gathered to celebrate Taylor's 67th birthday at a party in April.

He married actress Bianca Ferguson (General Hospital) in 1983. Other survivors include children Tariq, Yasmine, Tamar and Esme.

[david44]

Farewell Bobby Womack Mr Smooth whose delightful ditties muted headboardbanging when camped at m-in-law in darkest Streatham,in a long gone era when the wogs were on jam jars and jam jars were FordCapris b4 the world turned sour and lax.

Luther van Toss meets i-Van Moggyson

[Bogon]

Womack’s publicist, Sonya Kolowrat, said Friday that the singer had died, but she could provide no other details.

I think there is a spare Womack?

[FloridaBorn]

Looks just like Arsenio in that pic..

[Mr Lick]

Olympic runner and WW2 prisoner Louis Zamperini dies



Zamperini was held in solitary confinement for long stretches and told he would be executed

Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner and American World War Two veteran who survived two years as a prisoner of war, has died at the age of 97.

He died peacefully on Wednesday after a 40-day battle with pneumonia.

"His indomitable courage and fighting spirit were never more apparent than in these last days," his family said in a statement.

Zamperini's life was the subject of the 2010 book Unbroken and an upcoming film adaption to be released this year.

The film's director Angelina Jolie said his death was "a loss impossible to describe".

"We are all so grateful for how enriched our lives are for having known him. We will miss him terribly," she said in a statement.

The son of an Italian-immigrant father, Zamperini was born in 1917 in New York state and ran competitively at his high school and the University of Southern California.

In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, at 19 years old, he placed eighth in the 5,000m distance run. He ran the last lap in 59 seconds, earning him a handshake from Adolf Hitler.



Louis Zamperini finished a mile run in four minutes and 16 seconds in Seattle in May 1939

He left competitive running to enlist in the US Army in 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Zamperini served as a bombardier in World War Two and was searching for a downed military plane when his own crew crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

The crash killed eight of the 11 men on board. Zamperini survived 47 days adrift on a raft.

"We had rations of concentrated chocolate aboard, but during a storm the first night it all went overboard," he told an interviewer in 1988. "All we had left was three pints of water in cans."

They caught fish and sharks to eat and collected rainwater to stay alive.

He and the other survivors were eventually picked up by a Japanese patrol and spent the next two years in Japanese prison camps, including weeks solitary confinement on an island called Kwajalein where he was told he would be executed.

Zamperini was then held in an unregistered POW camp near Yokohama and tormented in particular by one guard he came to call "The Bird".

"There were constant beatings, punishments and torture, especially when bombers came over," he said.

He told an interviewer he later refused to broadcast Japanese propaganda messages in exchange for more comfortable accommodations.

The US declared him killed in action during his time as a war prisoner.



Louis Zamperini (right) with Captain Fred Garett after returning from Japan

He returned home after the war, married and became a devout Christian after meeting evangelist Billy Graham.

During the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, he ran a leg of the torch relay.

In May, Zamperini was chosen to serve as grand marshal of the 2015 Rose Parade, ahead of the college football playoff game in his home state of California.

Unbroken was written by best-selling author Laura Hillenbrand.

The film adaptation is scheduled for release in US theatres in December

[harrybarracuda]

LOS ANGELES — When E.T., the extraterrestrial, and his human chum Elliott reached across the cosmos to share a luminous touch of the fingertips, Anthony Goldschmidt was the unseen hand that brought them together.

Goldschmidt also was on the job when Thelma and Louise posed for their famous cheek-to-cheek selfie. And when the towering black waves of "The Perfect Storm" tossed around a little fishing boat called the Andrea Gail. And when the loopy characters of "Young Frankenstein" glared down onto the Sunset Strip from an eight-story vertical billboard on the side of the Playboy building.

Goldschmidt, a graphic designer whose firm created some of Hollywood's most memorable movie posters, died June 17 in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 71. His wife, Cari Rachel, said he had cancer.

Starting in the early 1970s, Goldschmidt was in the vanguard of designers infusing a fresh marketing approach into a business whose messages had grown stale, said Joel Wayne, the former executive vice president for creative advertising at Warner Bros.

"He was the godfather of movie branding," Wayne said. "He brought a very big design concept to a business that thought: 'Why do we need anyone to do anything but blow up a still shot of the star, put some type on it, and send it to the newspapers?'"

Instead, Goldschmidt and his team tried to distill an emotional essence from the films they advertised. With movies still in production and some plot elements kept secret even as campaigns were conceived, that was often a tricky task.

Building buzz about the 1982 release of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," Goldschmidt and artist John Alvin never actually laid eyes on E.T. himself. All they had to rely on were rough descriptions of the lovable alien's bony hand from director Steven Spielberg.

Still, the fingertip moment they created struck an immediate chord.

"Steven saw it and said, 'Oh, my God - that's it!'" said Michael Rosenberg, co-chairman of Imagine Entertainment and a longtime friend of Goldschmidt's.

In addition to posters, Goldschmidt's Intralink Film Graphic Design, a firm he started in 1979, produced trailers and other ad material.

If the Academy Awards honored graphic design and market strategy, "I believe Anthony Goldschmidt would be the first recipient," Rosenberg said.

Born Sept. 15, 1942, in New York City, Anthony Jakob Goldschmidt was the grandson of an influential German Jewish banker and art collector who fled the Nazis in the 1930s.

After attending private schools in Massachusetts and Switzerland, Goldschmidt received a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master of fine arts from Yale.

He was an art director for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency before heading to Hollywood and a production assistant's job at Warner Bros.

Among the first films he promoted were Mel Brooks comedies. The "Blazing Saddles" poster he concocted with longtime art director Alvin is replete with little touches suggesting the 1974 film's zany essence; a headdress on Mel Brooks' wisecracking Indian chief is inscribed with the slogan "Kosher for Passover."

Later that year, the massive "Young Frankenstein" poster on the Playboy building raised hackles; the biggest ad in town - at 465 square feet, the size of a small apartment - neglected to mention the film's writers.

"I don't consider it a billboard," Goldschmidt said at the time. "It's a work of art."

Although some of Goldschmidt's work reflected the over-the-top nature of the films he was pitching, his trademark style was simple and sophisticated, hinting at a movie's impact rather than hammering it home.

"There was even a phrase around town - 'That's very much a Goldschmidt look,'" said Mark Crawford, the owner of Blood & Chocolate, an entertainment advertising firm, and one of Goldschmidt's former Intralink colleagues.

Goldschmidt's poster for "The Color Purple" (1985) was a simple, backlit profile of the main character in a rocking chair, reading a letter. The image for "Apollo 13" (1995) was a view of the title spacecraft nearing a dark curve of the moon, with the Earth a bright blue orb in the distance.

His other movie work included "Gremlins" (1984), "Empire of the Sun" (1987), "Rain Man" (1988), "A Few Good Men" (1992), "The Da Vinci Code" (2006) and "Sex and the City" (2008).

Although Goldschmidt closed his firm in 2011, he was chosen to design the 2012 Academy Awards poster. "Life. Camera. Action," it said. "Celebrate the movies in all of us."

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brother Marc. A previous marriage ended in divorce.

Poll: Most iconic movie poster designed by Anthony Goldschmidt? - IMDb - IMDb

[Mr Lick]

US billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife dies aged 82



Richard Mellon Scaife died a day after his 82nd birthday

US billionaire publisher and influential conservative Richard Mellon Scaife has died aged 82.

His death comes less than two months after he had announced he had an untreatable form of cancer.

The heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune, he helped finance the election campaigns of Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Mr Scaife also backed inquiries in the 1990s to discredit the then Democratic President, Bill Clinton.

Ms Scaife died early on Friday at his home, his newspaper - the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - reported.

It said his death came just just one day after his 82nd birthday, without providing further details.

Mr Scaife was an ardent supporter of right-wing causes, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to think-tanks, lobbyists and conservative newspapers and magazines.

[harrybarracuda]

I publish this one because I think he's a brave man and it speaks volumes that he had no faith that the UK healthcare system would prevent needless suffering. And he looks like he enjoyed life.

RIP mate.

Author and former Eastbourne Herald reporter John Dyson has died at the age of 77.

John, from Polegate, was well-known as the author of 59 Western novels.

His son Dominic said, “Following a decade living with prostate cancer, John’s health was declining and he bravely chose to take his own life at Beachy Head on June 14. We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

[billy the kid]

We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

NHS is a very very scary place to end up.

Beachy Head the preferred way out.

Says a lot about compassion in our society.

RIP to the guy.

[Gravesend Dave]

We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

NHS is a very very scary place to end up.

Beachy Head the preferred way out.

Says a lot about compassion in our society.

RIP to the guy.

Just thinking the man would probably of took the same action had he been private.

If you have a terminal illness you know your number is up

RIP the man choose his own terms,nothing to do with compassion in our society

[Mr Lick]

Mike Hawker - obituary

Mike Hawker was a lyricist whose bittersweet I Only Want to Be With You launched Dusty Springfield to international stardom




Mike Hawker, who has died aged 77, was the lyricist whose bittersweet Sixties hits I Only Want To Be With You and Walkin’ Back To Happiness brought a blend of toe-tapping optimism and rhyming wit to songs that detailed love on the rocks.

His first writing credit was on Sally Kelly’s jaunty Buddy Holly-esque number Honey That’s Alright (1960). The following year, however, he began a highly successful period writing (with the composer John Schroeder) for Helen Shapiro — the teenage sensation nicknamed “foghorn” — with Don’t treat me like a child (which charted at No 3) and You Don’t Know which went to No 1. “I vividly recall walking into my manager’s office in Denmark Street and being greeted with the popping of corks,” recalled the singer. However, it was her next number with lyrics by Hawker, Walkin’ Back To Happiness, that would sell more than a million records.


Shapiro crooned Hawker’s plaintive opening (“Funny how it’s true/ what loneliness can do/ Since I’ve been away/ I have loved you more each day”) before swooping into a barrelling refrain: “Walking back to happiness/ woopah/ oh yeah yeah/ Said goodbye to loneliness/ Woopah/ Oh yeah yeah”. It soared to the top of the charts and won Hawker and Schroeder the Ivor Novello Award for the best song of 1961.


Mike Hawker’s success with Shapiro was matched two years later when Dusty Springfield, having left her band The Springfields, chose one of his songs (created this time with Ivor Raymonde) for her first solo single. I Only Want To Be With You was released in November 1963 and launched Springfield’s international career, taking her to America as part of the “British Invasion”. It would later be covered by artists as diverse as the Bay City Rollers and Samantha Fox.


Michael Edwin Hawker was born on November 29 1936 in Bath, Somerset. His father was an RAF officer posted to Singapore where Mike Hawker lived until the Japanese invasion. The family fled to England and Mike spent the war with relatives in the West Country and in Yorkshire.

• Hawker’s National Service with the RAF took him to Germany where he saw American jazz bands on tour and wrote reviews for the music press. At the beginning of the Sixties, he worked for the promotions department at EMI where he met John Schroeder. The pair shared a house and began writing together.

In 1960, Hawker spotted a singer called Jean Ryder (of the female session group The Breakaways) on the Saturday night music show Oh Boy. “I’m going to marry her,” he told his friend, and he did, on December 1 1961.

Don Black, the songwriter nicknamed “the man with the golden pen” due to his success writing James Bond themes, recalled the time when in the early Sixties he and Hawker were friends. “We were very poor and I wanted to make money by writing songs,” recalled Black. “Mike was also a songwriter and I thought, 'You can’t make any money’ and he came in one day and showed me a cheque for £1,200 from the PRS [the Performing Right Society] and I couldn’t believe it. It was like a zillion pounds at the time, coming from a very modest background, and it was for Walkin’ Back To Happiness and I thought, 'My God’. I [realised] it was possible to make money in this magical thing of writing words.”



Mike Hawker in later life

In between writing for Shapiro and Springfield, Hawker wrote Men Will Deceive You for Honor Blackman (“When they tell you they are misunderstood/ They’re only playing wolf to your Riding Hood/ Go on girls you be wise/ Send them back, back to their wives”). His other songs for Dusty Springfield, included Stay Awhile and I Wish I’d Never Loved You.

Hawker went on to write with Brian Bennett of The Shadows and manage a stable of recording artists. He gave Labi Siffre his first recording deal and Paul Simon visited him while touring the English folk clubs (the pair wrote a number of songs together). This led to him joining Mercury Records as an artist and repertoire manager (the youngest at any UK record company) specialising in jazz musicians such as the Harry South Big Band and Tubby Hayes.

In later life Hawker concentrated on writing books and film scripts.

Mike Hawker’s marriage to Jean Ryder was dissolved. He is survived by his partner of 20 years, Mar Bernabeu, and a son and daughter from his marriage

[Mr Lick]

Stephen Gaskin - obituary

Stephen Gaskin was a teacher who led a caravan of hippies across America to found a commune built on tradition



Stephen Gaskin in 1969 Photo: ALAMY



Stephen Gaskin, was a self-confessed “professional hippy” who became an unlikely presidential candidate.


As a proponent of love, peace and harmony, he co-founded “The Farm” — a spiritual community of like-minded tie-die clad, vegetarian, pot-smoking pacifists — in Summertown, Tennessee, in 1971. It became the largest hippy community in the world and an example of an effective self-sufficient subculture.


As a potential leader of the free world — campaigning in the primary elections of 2000 — Gaskin was a Green Party hopeful with a mission to introduce universal health care, reform financial institutions and legalise marijuana.


Although he failed to win the Green Party ticket for the presidential poll he fought a frank and funny campaign. “Did you inhale?” he was asked about his personal experience of marijuana. “I didn’t exhale,” he answered.


Stephen Gaskin was born on February 16 1935 in Denver, Colorado, and had a peripatetic, eclectic upbringing that, while atheist, was inclusive of various cultures. His father was variously a cowboy, builder, mail clerk and commercial fisherman and Stephen was raised throughout the south west of America, with periods in Santa Fe, Phoenix, and San Bernardino. “I’d been to so many different places I had to learn how to make friends on purpose,” he recalled. He maintained that his freethinking was hereditary, noting that his grandmother was a suffragette and his great uncle helped the longshoreman’s union in San Francisco.



Gaskin served in the US Marine Corps between 1952 and 1955, during which time he fought in Korea. During the Sixties he lived in San Francisco, where he taught English, semantics and creative writing at San Francisco State University, working under the celebrated linguist and semanticist SI Hayakawa.



Gaskin with one of his Monday Night Classes

Gaskin’s formal teaching grew into a more personal and philosophical pursuit through his experimental “Monday Night Class” — an open discussion group involving up to 1,500 students and held in 1969 and 1970 at a huge auditorium in the city’s Bay Area. His classes ranged from “Group Experiments in Unified Field Theory” to “Magic, Einstein, and God”. In these gatherings he discussed “consciousness, the spiritual plane, religion, politics, sex, drugs and current events” — all viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens of the Sixties counterculture movement (and its psychedelic pharmaceutical refreshments). Unified by the hippy sensibility, the classes formed the genesis of the group that settled at The Farm.


In 1970 Gaskin led 250 people in a caravan of “20 or 30 old buses” from San Francisco to Tennessee on a four-month lecture tour of churches and colleges.

“The farther we went, the more people there were who joined the caravan,” he said. “Pretty soon there were three or four hundred of us and the police were meeting us every time we crossed a state line.”




Gaskin's caravan of hippies crossing America to Tennessee in 1971

As a location for a commune their pocket of Tennessee countryside, with its blackjack oaks and Amish communities, held mixed blessings. Though the thousand acres of farmland they bought was cheap, it was closer to the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan than it was to a main road or a hospital.

The community that Gaskin built was not based on free-love — its core values included the sanctity of marriage, importance of hard work and respect for the Tennessee locals: “You can’t jive anybody who’s teaching you how to run a tractor.

It’s something to watch a cat who was once with the Hell’s Angels being taught to run a tractor by an old man – and being respectful to that old farmer.”

Eventually, applicants to join The Farm required sponsorship by a resident, a plan for their livelihood, and an explanation of what they might bring to the community. They then had to pass a probationary period.

Gaskin’s attitude to drugs also followed a – relatively – conservative line. “Don’t lose your head to a fad,” he said. “The idea is that you want to get open so you can experience other folks, not all closed up and off on your own trip. So you shouldn’t take speed or smack or coke. You shouldn’t take barbiturates or tranquillisers. All that kind of dope really dumbs you out. Don’t take anything that makes you dumb. It’s hard enough to get smart.”



In 1974, however, Gaskin went to prison for possession of marijuana. “After we’d been here for a while, we got busted for growing a hundred pounds of grass in the back,” he said. “And we weren’t sure whether the neighbours were more uptight with us for doing that or for being so dumb that we planted it in the deer trails where every hunter who came through could see it.”

He served one year of a three-year sentence. On his release he discovered that his voting rights had been rescinded. He sued the government and after a series of lower court victories won his case, in 1981, at the Tennessee Supreme Court .

Under Gaskin’s guidance The Farm’s ethos extended well beyond its geographical boundaries. The community supported aid efforts in Guatemala, Chernobyl, Belize and the Bronx in New York.

Meanwhile, his wife, Ina May, developed a respected free midwifery service for residents and “outsiders” alike — she turned down an offer to be privately flown to Hollywood when Demi Moore went into labour. Other on-site ventures have also flourished, from book publishing to a soy dairy.

Gaskin was a prolific writer. His books on hippy spirituality include The Caravan (1971); Hey Beatnik! This is the Farm Book (1974); and Amazing Dope Tales and Haight Ashbury Flashbacks (1980).

In 2004 Gaskin was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame, joining the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and his own wife, Ina May.

While The Farm was home to thousands in its heyday, there are presently just 200 residents — the majority of whom are over 50. It is, however, one of the longest running communes in America. When asked in old age why the community survived, Gaskin emphasised its practical approach. “We were hippies wanting to live together and we accepted the discipline it took to do that,” he said. “Utopia means nowhere. The Farm has a zip code.”

Stephen Gaskin was married and divorced three times before he married Ina May Middleton. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter, along with a daughter from his second marriage and a son from a “non-marital relationship”. Another son predeceased him.


Stephen Gaskin, born February 16 1935, July 1 2014

[harrybarracuda]

We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

NHS is a very very scary place to end up.

Beachy Head the preferred way out.

Says a lot about compassion in our society.

RIP to the guy.

Just thinking the man would probably of took the same action had he been private.

If you have a terminal illness you know your number is up

RIP the man choose his own terms,nothing to do with compassion in our society

Exactly. But I think I'd prefer to press my own morphine overdose button when I felt the time was right rather than leap off a cliff FFS.

[harrybarracuda]

Eduard Shevardnadze dies at age 86
by
KG/Associated Press
07.07.2014 - 11:19
Eduard Shevardnadze, a groundbreaking Soviet foreign minister and later the president of an independent Georgia, has died at the age of 86.

His spokeswoman Marina Davitashvili said Shevardnadze died Monday after a long illness.

Shevardnadze swept heroically across the international stage in the final years of the Soviet empire, helping topple the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War, but as the leader of post-Soviet Georgia his career in the public eye ended in humiliation and he was chased out of his parliament and forced into retirement.

[Bobcock]

We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

NHS is a very very scary place to end up.

Beachy Head the preferred way out.

Says a lot about compassion in our society.

RIP to the guy.

Must be the English, the NHS in Wales helped greatly in both my parents having peaceful and dignified endings.

[harrybarracuda]

We think he did not want to go back into hospital.”

NHS is a very very scary place to end up.

Beachy Head the preferred way out.

Says a lot about compassion in our society.

RIP to the guy.

Must be the English, the NHS in Wales helped greatly in both my parents having peaceful and dignified endings.

As in overdosed them or just kept them morphined up until they passed away?