The RIP Famous Person Thread

[AntRobertson]

[SKkin]

[harrybarracuda]

I did have a little chuckle...

[kmart]

^lol. Reminds me of this:

[happynz]

^ 555 lol

[misskit]

Roy Clark, country guitar virtuoso, 'Hee Haw' star, dies at 85



Country Music Hall of Fame member and versatile entertainer Roy Clark died Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after complications from pneumonia, his publicist said. He was 85.


A fleet-fingered instrumentalist best known for his 24 years as a "Hee Haw" co-host, the affable Clark was one of country music's most beloved ambassadors.


He brought heart and humor to audiences around the world, guest-hosted "The Tonight Show," worked with greats like Hank Williams and blues artist Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and inspired countless pickers, including a young Brad Paisley, with his instructional guitar books.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...died/38535313/

[Ukan Kizmiaz]

[harrybarracuda]

William Goldman, Oscar-winning screenwriter of ‘Butch Cassidy’ and ‘All the President’s Men,’ dies at 87




Badly hung over, the detective rises from a fold-out couch in his office. He turns off the TV that has been on all night, dunks his head in ice water, shuffles into the kitchen and prepares a fresh coffee filter, only to realize he is out of grounds.

He opens his wastebasket. Spies yesterday’s filter. Hesitates … and fishes it out. He gulps from his mug with an expression of revulsion and resignation, imparting everything the viewer needs to know about his life. The rotten coffee is the least of his problems.

That opening scene, from the 1966 mystery film “Harper” starring Paul Newman, is widely considered a masterpiece of screenwriting, revealing depths of character without a single word.


It was the work of novice screenwriter William Goldman, who went on to become a towering craftsmen of the movies – winning Academy Awards for the convention-flouting Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and the Watergate thriller “All the President’s Men” (1976) and adapting his fantasy sendup novel “The Princess Bride” into a generational touchstone in 1987. He died Nov. 16 at 87 at his home in Manhattan of complications from colon cancer and pneumonia, said his daughter Jenny Goldman.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Goldman regarded himself as a novelist who just happened to write motion pictures. “In terms of authority,” he wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” his 1983 memoir and acid critique of show business, “screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week).”


But his film legacy vastly overshadowed his best-selling and genre-crossing books. He became a phenomenal critical and commercial success in Hollywood, not least for his talent for indelible cinematic phrasemaking.

From “Butch Cassidy”: “Rules??! In a knife fight?”

From “All the President’s Men”: “Follow the money.”



From “The Princess Bride”: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

From “Marathon Man,” his Nazi-conspiracy novel turned film, which contains the most terrifying dental sequence of all time: “Is it safe?”

With a rare exception of talents such as Billy Wilder, screenwriters had long tended toward obscurity. Goldman became one of the first authors to change that tradition when “Butch Cassidy” fetched what even he considered an outlandish $400,000 in a studio bidding war. It made him an instant celebrity, lionized and vilified.


“It got in all the papers, because nobody at this time knew anything about screenwriters – because all they knew is that actors made up all the lines and directors had all the visual concepts,” he told the Writers Guild Foundation. “And the idea of this obscene amount of money going to this (guy) who lives in New York who wrote a Western drove them nuts. It was the most vicious stuff and, when the movie opened, the reviews were pissy.”

The tale of inept bank robbers was a virtuosic takedown of the mythology surrounding the American West. Newman played the fast-talking outlaw Butch; Robert Redford, then a relative unknown, was cast as his sardonic partner in crime, Sundance.

Their tough-guy attitudes are played for laughs in a memorable cliff-dive into a raging river. They need to make the leap to evade a posse, but Sundance confesses he can’t swim. “Are you crazy?” Butch chortles. “The fall will probably kill ya.”

Critics were slow to embrace the film – Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker ran with the headline “The Bottom of the Pit” – but audiences responded to its comically absurdist, anti-establishment tone. An interlude featuring Butch and a female companion riding a bicycle to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” became one of the most memorable sequences in 1960s cinema. The film cost $6.5 million to produce and generated more than $40 million, and it made Redford a breakout sensation.

Goldman collaborated with Redford on several more films, most notably but most unhappily “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate break-in and cover-up that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Redford had purchased the rights to the book and hired Goldman to write the movie version. “It seemed, at best, a dubious project,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” “Politics were anathema at the box office, the material was talky, there was no action.”

Goldman looked upon the Watergate saga, with its inept conspirators, as something of a “comic opera.” He opened with the break-in by Nixon operatives at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, presenting the burglars as bumblers with the wrong set of keys.

Redford, who like the reporters regarded the affair as a grievous subversion of democracy, reportedly objected to the shaggy-dog approach, reminiscent of “Butch Cassidy.”

Many hands began operating on the script – a source of discontent for Goldman. He took credit for the movie’s unorthodox finale, which showed Woodward and Bernstein making an embarrassing mistake. Goldman believed that audiences, who would watch the film for the first time two years after Nixon resigned, would understand that the reporters, dogged but human, had been vindicated.

Goldman’s screenwriting career later soared under director Rob Reiner with “The Princess Bride” – a fractured fairy tale that winks at cliches of romance and swashbuckling adventure – and then “Misery” (1990), based on Stephen King’s novel about a popular writer held hostage and brutalized by a sociopathic fan. (Goldman helped write the 2015 Broadway play version starring Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalf.)

Among other films, Goldman worked on the tongue-in-cheek Western “Maverick” (1994); “Absolute Power” (1997), adapted from David Baldacci’s best-selling suspense novel; and two further King adaptations, “Hearts in Atlantis” (2001) and “Dreamcatcher” (2003). For years, Goldman was one of the best-paid script doctors in Hollywood, reportedly making $1 million for four weeks’ work.

Goldman, who learned his trade from a screenwriting guidebook he bought in 1964 at an all-night bookstore in Times Square, abhorred film schools and auteur theory. In profanity-laced interviews, he repeated his mantras: “Screenplays are structure,” “stories are everything.”

“It’s not like writing a book,” he said to the publication Creative Screenwriting in 2015. “It’s not like a play. You’re writing for camera and audiences. One of the things which I tell young people is, when you’re starting up, go to see a movie all day long.”

“By the time the 8:00 show comes,” he continued, “you’ll hate the movie so much you won’t pay much attention to it. But you’ll pay attention to the audience. The great thing about audiences is, I believe they react exactly the same around the world at the same places in movies. They laugh, and they scream, and they’re bored. And when they’re bored it’s the writer’s fault.”

William Weil Goldman was born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1931, and grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. His upbringing was tense, with a mother he described as hectoring and an alcoholic businessman father who committed suicide by overdosing on pills when Goldman was 15.

Movies were his escape, and his favorite was the 1939 adventure film “Gunga Din,” which featured a scene that inspired the cliff-leaping episode in “Butch Cassidy.” He entered Oberlin College in Ohio aspiring to write short stories but had ludicrously bad luck getting any published, even while serving as an editor of a campus literary magazine.

“I would anonymously submit my short stories,” he told the London Guardian. “When the other editors – two brilliant girls – would read them, they would say, ‘We can’t possibly publish this (rubbish).’ And I would agree.”

He graduated in 1952, spent two years in the Army, then received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1956. While working toward a doctorate, he wrote his first novel in a three-week catharsis of pent-up fear that he would wind up as a high school English teacher in Duluth, Minnesota – the only job offer he had waiting.

The resulting book, “The Temple of Gold” (1957), a coming-of-age story, impressed a prestigious publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Other books followed at a furious clip, among them “Boys and Girls Together,” a 1964 bestseller about a group of struggling young adults in New York, and his Boston Strangler-like thriller “No Way to Treat a Lady,” published the same year and turned into a film in 1968 starring Rod Steiger as a psychopathic killer with a penchant for disguise.

Goldman adapted for film several novels, including Ira Levin’s suburban horror story “The Stepford Wives” (1975) and Cornelius Ryan’s World War II book “A Bridge Too Far” (1977). His screenplay for his 1974 novel “Marathon Man,” about a graduate student who stumbles on a nest of modern-day Nazis, became a hit 1976 film with Laurence Olivier as a dentist who drills into teeth as a method of torture. He also wrote the original script of “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), with Redford as a barnstorming pilot.

Goldman’s later books included the Hollywood casting-couch story “Tinsel” (1979), the Cold War science-fiction thriller “Control” (1982), and “Hype and Glory” (1990), a droll reflection on his service as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant.

His 30-year marriage to photographer Ilene Jones ended in divorce in 1991. In addition to his daughter, of Philadelphia, survivors include his domestic partner of 19 years, Susan Burden of Manhattan; and a grandson.

Another daughter from his marriage, Susanna Goldman, died in 2015. His brother, James Goldman, who won an Oscar for his screen adaptation of his play “The Lion in Winter” and wrote the book to Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Follies,” died in 1998.

In “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” with its gossipy behind-the-scenes look at the caprice of art and commerce, Mr. Goldman coined an enduring phrase in the Hollywood lexicon: “Nobody knows anything.” After decades in the business, he had come to see success and failure as a matter of chance.
He had his share of flops, such as “The Ghost and the Darkness,” a 1996 thriller about the hunt for two lions who kill railway workers in Africa. It was a taut story, starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer, and got strong reviews but played to empty theaters.

“If you can believe in the existence of evil, you can understand that story,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “Nobody wanted the lions to be that successful. We live in a Disney world. Maybe we miscast the lions.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/...en-dies-at-87/

[harrybarracuda]

BBC newsreader Richard Baker dies aged 93



Richard Baker, who introduced the first BBC television news bulletin in 1954 and became a leading news presenter, has died at the age of 93.

Known for his rich, deep tones and calm, avuncular manner, Baker was closely associated for many years with the BBC’s classical music coverage. He presented the annual Last Night of the Proms and hosted programmes on Radio 2 and Radio 4, beginning his broadcasting career in 1950 on the Third Programme, later to become Radio 3.

On hearing of Baker’s death, the veteran BBC correspondent John Simpson tweeted: “Richard Baker … was one of the finest newsreaders of modern times: highly intelligent, thoughtful, gentle, yet tough in defence of his principles.”


A popular choice as narrator, Baker provided the voice of children’s television shows such as Mary, Mungo and Midge, as well as recording an acclaimed version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

“[He] had one of the great microphone voices of recent times,” said the Gramophone critic Jeremy Nicholas just three years ago. “His narration, ideally balanced against the orchestra, bears repeated listening.”

The son of a plasterer from Willesden, north London, Baker went to grammar school and studied history and modern languages at Cambridge, where he also enjoyed amateur dramatics. His undergraduate years were interrupted by the second world war, when he served on a minesweeper with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

Baker married Margaret, a childhood friend, in 1961. His love of performance occasionally burst through the newsreader’s veneer of respectability. He made three guest appearances on Monty Python’s Flying Circus and became a regular on the panel game Face the Music.

In 1977 he was among a troupe of BBC presenters to take part in a memorable Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show production of the show song There is Nothing Like a Dame.

In recent years Baker moved into a retirement home, where he found a novel way of settling in. Each day he would select the interesting headlines from the day’s papers and read them aloud to his fellow residents at six o’clock over supper.

Baker’s son James said his father died on Saturday morning at the Sir John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...r-dies-aged-93

[Neverna]

I thought he'd died already earlier this year.

[david44]

I thought he'd died already earlier this year.

perhaps you'd also recalled this that was a headline earlier

THAMES NEWS. 29.7.85. STABBING: DEATH - RICHARD BAKER, 17, RAYNES PARK PARTY GATECRASHING

[Troy]

^ Always liked Richard Baker...

[harrybarracuda]

I did look on Russia Today for an obituary, but there isn't one. Perhaps they are still writing it.

Zhores Medvedev, a scientist and one of the most prominent political dissidents in the former Soviet Union, whose writings exposed quackery and fraud in Soviet scientific programs and led to his arrest and eventual exile from his homeland, died Nov. 15 in London. He died one day after his 93rd birthday.


His death was confirmed to Radio Free Europe by a friend, writer Semyon Reznik. Dr. Medvedev’s twin brother and fellow dissident, historian Roy Medvedev, told Russian news agencies that his brother had a heart attack.

Dr. Medvedev worked at leading Soviet laboratories early in his career and published nearly 100 research papers before his political activism derailed his scientific career. With expertise in microbiology, biochemistry and genetics, he grew particularly alarmed at the ideas propagated since the 1930s by Trofim D. Lysenko, a scientific charlatan who captivated the imagination of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Lysenko, who denied the existence of genes, believed that plants and animals could be magically transformed or “educated” by force of will and exposure to Soviet ideals. Among other things, he said wheat plants could be changed to rye and that seeds soaked in freezing water could adapt to cold climates. Orange trees, he predicted, would one day grow in Siberia.

When these notions were put into practice, they inevitably led to disaster: rotting crops, soil depleted of nutrients and, ultimately, widespread famine. Nevertheless, Lysenko held sway over Soviet agricultural practices for years, and his influence could still be felt until Nikita Khrushchev was ousted as the country’s leader in 1964.

By then, Dr. Medvedev had been at work for three years in writing a history of Lysenko and his harmful doctrines. He worked with other scientists, including physicist Andrei D. Sakharov — who later received the Nobel Peace Prize— to expose Lysenko as a fraud.


Dr. Medvedev’s study of Lysenko was not approved for official publication in the Soviet Union, but samizdat, or clandestine, copies circulated among the intelligentsia. In 1969, the book was translated into English and published as “The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko.”
Dr. Medvedev was fired from his job at an agricultural research laboratory, and within a few months was summoned to a meeting with a psychiatrist, on the pretext of discussing the behavior of his teenage son. Instead, Dr. Medvedev was taken to a holding cell, where he managed to pick the lock and walk away.

Soon afterward, on May 29, 1970, as Dr. Medvedev recounted in his book “A Question of Madness,” he was confronted at his home by two psychiatrists accompanied by several police officers.

“ ‘If you refuse to talk to us,’ one of the psychiatrists told Dr. Medvedev, ‘then we will be obliged to draw the appropriate conclusions . . . And how do you feel yourself, Zhores Aleksandrovich?’


“I answered that I felt marvelous.

“ ‘But if you feel so marvelous, then why do you think we have turned up here today?’

“ ‘Obviously, you must answer that question yourself,’ I replied.

“A police major arrived.

“ ‘ And who on earth might you be?’ Dr. Medvedev asked. ‘I didn’t invite you here.’ ”

“He protested, to no avail, that the homes of Soviet citizens were considered private and inviolable to the forces of the state.

“ ‘Get to your feet!” the police major ordered Dr. Medvedev. ‘I order you to get to your feet!’ ”

Two lower-ranking officers, twisted Dr. Medvedev’s arms behind his back, forced him out of his house and into an ambulance. He was driven to a psychiatric hospital.

The preliminary diagnosis was “severe mental illness dangerous to the public,” and Dr. Medvedev was repeatedly warned to stop his “publicist activities.”

Meanwhile, his brother, Sakharov and other activists for greater openness in the Soviet system sent telegrams and published open letters calling for Dr. Medvedev’s release. One of his friends, the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then still living in the Soviet Union, condemned Dr. Medvedev’s detention with a bold and blistering statement.

“The incarceration of freethinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder,” he said. “It is a fiendish and prolonged torture . . . These crimes will never be forgotten, and all those who take part in them will be condemned endlessly, while they live and after they’re dead.

“It is shortsighted to think that you can live constantly relying on force alone, constantly scorning the objections of conscience.”
Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature later that year.

Dr. Medvedev was released after 19 days. In the meantime, he and his brother wrote an account of the ordeal, “A Question of Madness,” which was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the United States in 1971.

Officers promptly went to Roy Medvedev’s apartment in Moscow and seized his papers. He was fired from his job at a research institute. Dr. Medvedev, in the meantime, was assigned to a laboratory to study gerontology researcher.

When he tried to present a paper in 1972 at a scientific conference in Kiev, Ukraine — then part of the Soviet Union — plainclothes officers seized him, fearing what he might say in public, and sent him back to Moscow.

In December 1972, Dr. Medvedev received a rare visa to travel to Great Britain, where he was scheduled to spend a year working in a medical research laboratory. He moved there with his wife and one of their two sons; the other son was detained in a Soviet jail.
While living in England, Dr. Medvedev published a book about Solzhenitsyn and his battles against Soviet authorities, which seemed to be the final straw. When he sought permission to travel to a conference in California, he went to the Soviet embassy. Instead, his passport was seized, and his citizenship was revoked.

Dr. Medvedev stayed in London, where he became a medical researcher and wrote widely on science and Soviet history. In a 1979 book, “Nuclear Disaster in the Urals,” he revealed that a 1957 nuclear explosion in the Soviet Union claimed hundreds of lives. He also revealed that a 1960 rocket explosion killed dozens of members of the Soviet space program.

In 1989, government officials finally admitted that the 1957 nuclear explosion Dr. Medvedev had described years earlier actually took place.

“I feel better they finally have recognized that all this secrecy has made them suffer,” he said, “and that it’s better people know about this.”

He also published a history of Soviet agriculture and a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who steered the country toward closer relations with the West.

Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev and his brother were born Nov. 14, 1925, in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union.
Their mother was a cellist, and their father was a professor of philosophy in Leningrad, where the brothers grew up. During the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, their father was arrested and was never seen again.

The brothers vowed to uphold his legacy of free thinking and inquiry. Roy Medvedev was among the first historians in the Soviet Union to cast a critical eye on Stalin and his regime. The brothers jointly wrote a biography of Stalin that was published in English in 2004.
In 1989, as the Communist Party was losing its grip, Dr. Medvedev was allowed to visit Moscow — and to see his brother — for the first time in 16 years. He later had his citizenship restored but continued to live in London.

He was married in 1951 to Margarita Busina, and they had two sons and several grandchildren. Complete information about survivors was not available.

In 1990, Dr. Medvedev wrote an account of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which he considered inevitable, with the Soviet Union’s history of scientific and bureaucratic incompetence.

“In the end, I was surprised at how poorly designed the reactor actually was,” he told the New York Times in 1990. “I wanted to write this book not only to show the real scale of this particular catastrophe, but also to demolish a few more secrets and deliberate misconceptions.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...=.4a83c6428f7c

[Neverna]

Former Showaddywaddy bassist Al James dies aged 72

One of the original members of the pop group Showaddywaddy has died at the age of 72.

Bassist Al James, whose real name was Geoffrey Betts, died in hospital on Friday, three weeks after suffering a fall at his Market Harborough home.



https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-...shire-46248990

[Neverna]

[can123]

http://news.sky.com/story/vicar-of-d...ed-89-11556954




Dawn French has led the tributes to her Vicar of Dibley co-star John Bluthal, who has died at the age of 89.

[harrybarracuda]

Andrew Fitzgerald, who helped save 32 from a storm-sundered ship, dies at 87



Andrew Fitzgerald, the last surviving member of a Coast Guard crew that took a lifeboat out into the Atlantic in a raging blizzard in 1952 and rescued 32 of 33 merchant seamen clinging to the remains of a tanker that had split in half off Cape Cod, died Thursday in Aurora, Colorado. He was 87.


The Fairmount Funeral Home in Aurora said he died at Peakview Assisted Living. Fitzgerald left the Coast Guard months after the rescue and spent most of his life as an equipment salesman in Colorado.


It is often called the greatest small-boat rescue in the history of the Coast Guard, a feat of seamanship and courage in a 36-foot, engine-driven lifeboat that made international headlines and has been celebrated in books, magazines, documentaries and a Disney film, “The Finest Hours,” which was released in 2016.


“He doesn’t consider himself a hero to this day,” Fitzgerald’s wife, Gloria, who learned of the rescue two years after her marriage, told The Boston Globe in 2014. “He’d say, ‘It was three hours of work that we were supposed to do.’”


The rescue crew, in fact, were volunteers who risked their lives on what seafarers of that era regarded as a mission impossible.


Before dawn on Feb. 18, 1952, the 503-foot tanker Pendleton, with 41 crewmen and a cargo of oil and kerosene bound for Boston from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was engulfed off Cape Cod in a shrieking nor’easter, one of the worst in memory, battered by blinding snow, winds exceeding 80 mph and seas taller than a six-story building.


By 4 a.m., gargantuan waves were breaking over the stern. Welded hull plates groaned as the ship soared over the peaks and plunged into the troughs like a roller-coaster. Over the next couple of hours, explosive cracking noises shook the vessel, and at 5:50 a.m., the Pendleton, 6 miles off Chatham Light on the elbow of the cape, shuddered violently and broke in two.


“I was in my bunk,” Seaman Douglas B. Potts, a 31-year-old oiler, told The New York Times the next day. “There was a shock, and I looked out and saw the bow of the ship floating off to port.”


Separated amidships, the stern section rode the mountainous seas, spilling its cargo, but lost none of its 33 seamen. Many scrambled topside from bunks, a galley and fire and engine rooms, closing watertight doors as they went, a precaution that enabled the half-ship to remain afloat for more than 14 hours.


From the deck 40 feet above the waterline, and from compartments exposed like rooms denuded in an earthquake, seamen watched aghast as the bow section, with the bridge and radio shack, the captain and seven others, including most of the ship’s command staff, drifted away like an apparition in the storm.


There had been no time for an SOS from the bridge and there was no transmitter in the stern.


Over portable radio receivers, seamen in the stern learned that another tanker, the Fort Mercer, with 43 men aboard, had radioed an SOS from 20 miles offshore. Coast Guard vessels and planes were on the way to the Fort Mercer, the broadcast said, but there was no word about the Pendleton. In fact, no one on shore yet knew that the Pendleton had split apart.


Hours later, a Coast Guard plane found the Fort Mercer sundered in two sections. As rescue operations began there, a radar station on Cape Cod discovered to the amazement of officials that there were actually four hulks floating off Cape Cod. It was the first sign that two ships had broken apart in the gale. Aircraft soon identified the hulks closest to land as sections of the Pendleton, and a second rescue was mounted.


Four Coast Guardsmen at Chatham Lifeboat Station, which was nearest to the Pendleton, volunteered for the mission. They were Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernard C. Webber, coxswain of the anonymously labeled motorized lifeboat CG-36500, and his crew, Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Fitzgerald, the engineman, and seamen Richard Livesey and Ervin Maske.


Lifeboats are functional, not usually beautiful, and the CG-36500 was typical: a wide-beamed, low-slung wooden craft with a small wheelhouse in the stern, an enclosed compartment for the 90-horsepower engine amidships and a covered bow to afford protection for the crew and any rescued passengers in heavy seas. It was built for stability and to hold about a dozen people, not three times that number.


Soon after plunging into the roiling Atlantic about 6 p.m., the lifeboat was hit by a massive wave as it crossed Chatham’s offshore sandbar. The CG-36500 was hurled into the air, fell on its side and righted itself as another wave struck, shattering the wheelhouse windshield, flattening Webber and destroying the boat’s mounted compass.


Navigating by dead reckoning, a seaman’s instinct, Webber piloted the boat through darkness and turbulence. After an hour, he found the Pendleton’s stern. Fitzgerald, manning the searchlight, picked out the shattered walls, shredded wires and dangling plates of a half-ship. It lurched dangerously, and the lifeboat made a cautious approach, Capt. W. Russell Webster said in an official Coast Guard account.


“The searchlight soon revealed a pitch black mass of twisted metal, which heaved high in the air upon the massive waves and then settled back down in a frothing mass of foam,” he wrote. “Each movement of the giant hulk produced a cacophony of eerie groans as the broken ship twisted and strained in the 60-foot seas. No lights were apparent as coxswain Webber maneuvered the small boat aft along the port side of the Pendleton’s stern section.”


The enormous stern and the tiny lifeboat fell into an ungainly dance, rising and falling in tandem, then drawing apart to soar and plunge randomly. As the lifeboat rounded the stern, its searchlight caught the name Pendleton. Lights on the starboard deck high overhead suddenly glowed. A man frantically waving his arms appeared and disappeared. Seamen in orange life jackets then lined up along the starboard rail, shouting unintelligibly down into the wind and crashing seas.


The lifeboat crew had no idea how to get the stranded men off. Suddenly, a Jacob’s ladder, a seamen’s device of ropes and wood slats, was thrown over the rail and unrolled down the hull. Seamen climbed onto the wildly swinging ladder and began to descend. The first to reach bottom leapt onto the lifeboat’s bow and was pulled in by the crew as Webber struggled to hold his boat steady.


A line of descending men overhead clung to the rope ladder as it swayed perilously out and slammed back into the hull. With every roll of the stern, Webber tried to maneuver his boat close to let another seaman leap aboard. It was not always possible. Many fell into the freezing sea, but struggled to the surface and grabbed a safety line rigged around the lifeboat’s shell.


Again and again, Fitzgerald, Livesey and Maske hoisted waterlogged men onto the deck and bundled them into the shelter of the forward hold, the engine compartment or the wheelhouse. As the lifeboat filled with human cargo, it became increasingly unstable, shipping water and complicating the pilot’s ability to maneuver alongside for the transfers. Finally, 31 survivors were packed in.


Two still on the stern deck were Raymond Sybert, who as chief engineer was the senior officer on the stern and would be the last man off, and Seaman George Myers, the ship’s 300-pound cook, known as Tiny. Believing he would not survive, he had given much of his clothing to shipmates.


Shirtless in the gale, Myers climbed down the ladder. Near the bottom, he either slipped or mistimed his jump and fell into the sea. He resurfaced momentarily, but Fitzgerald, Livesey and Maske could not lift him aboard. He was hit by a wave and hurled back into the water. They watched helplessly as he drifted away and was swallowed by darkness and the sea.


Moments later, the lifeboat crew pulled Sybert to safety just as the Pendleton’s stern rolled one last time, and in a roar capsized and sank.


Webber radioed Chatham Station with the news. About an hour later, the overloaded CG-36500 churned into Chatham Harbor with its exhausted crew and 32 survivors. A throng of local residents was waiting at a pier and helped them ashore. Many were sobbing uncontrollably.


All eight men in the bow of the Pendleton were lost. Cutters rescued 38 seamen from the Fort Mercer’s stern, but five, including the captain, were lost in the bow section, which sank offshore.


Books about the rescue included “The Lifeboatmen” (1985), by the pilot of CG-36500, Bernard C. Webber; “The Pendleton Disaster Off Cape Cod: The Greatest Small Boat Rescue in Coast Guard History” (2007), by Theresa Mitchell Barbo, John Galluzzo and Capt. W. Russell Webster; and “The Finest Hours” (2009), by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.


The CG-36500, built in 1946, was decommissioned in 1968 and given to Cape Cod National Seashore. Without funds for restoration, the boat deteriorated until it was acquired by the Orleans Historical Society on Cape Cod. Volunteers restored it, and it became a floating museum, visited by thousands every year.


Fitzgerald left the Coast Guard eight months after the rescue and returned to the town where he had been born, Whitinsville, Massachusetts, about 14 miles southeast of Worcester.


Andrew J. Fitzgerald Jr. was born there on March 19, 1931, to Andrew and Edna Fitzgerald. He worked at a machine shop, earned an associate degree in engineering at Worcester Junior College and in 1956 married Gloria Frabotta, who survives him.


He is also survived by a daughter, Dawn Huffman; a son, Michael; a brother, Bill; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.


Fitzgerald sold electric motors and clutches in New England before moving to Denver for his employer. He sold precision inspection equipment there until he retired in the 1990s.


In 2002, a 50th-anniversary reunion of the rescue crew was held at the historic Mariners House in Boston’s North End. The four also returned to Chatham for an outing on the CG-36500. Maske died in 2003, Livesey in 2007 and Webber in 2009.


The inscription on their Coast Guard medals read, “In testimony of heroic deeds in saving life from the perils of water.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-...S_seattle-news

[harrybarracuda]

If you didn't see the film by the way, it's quite good.

https://rarbg.to/torrent/9813ubd

[harrybarracuda]

Director Nicolas Roeg dies aged 90




Director Nicolas Roeg, whose films include Don't Look Now and Performance, has died aged 90, his family says.

In a career spanning six decades, he was celebrated for his original and controversial film-making.

His 1973 psychological thriller Don't Look Now caused controversy for its graphic sex scenes.

Mr Roeg also directed Mick Jagger in the crime drama Performance and David Bowie in the science fiction movie The Man Who Fell To Earth.

(Full Obituary)


Nicolas Roeg was one of the most original film-makers the UK has ever produced.

His early experience as a cinematographer brought a stunning visual quality to his work. He often exasperated the critics and gained a reputation as being hard on his actors.

And he took a delight in jumbling scenes and time to both bewitch and bewilder his audiences.

Nicolas Roeg was born in St John's Wood in north London on 15 August 1928. His father Jack, who was of Dutch ancestry, worked in the diamond trade but lost a lot of money when his investments failed in South Africa.

The first film he remembered seeing as a child was Babes in Toyland, starring Laurel and Hardy.

Roeg did his National Service after World War Two before getting a job making tea and operating the clapper board at Marylebone Studios, where he worked on a number of minor films.

By the dawn of the 1960s he had progressed to camera operator, notably on The Trials of Oscar Wilde and Fred Zinnemann's film The Sundowners.

He was part of the second unit on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Lean later sacked him as director of photography on Doctor Zhivago after the two constantly quarrelled.

Many of the stunning scenes that won the latter film an Oscar were shot by Roeg but he was not credited.

His breakthrough came in 1964 when he worked as a cinematographer on Roger Corman's film The Masque of the Red Death, an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, starring Vincent Price.

Corman was gaining a reputation for spotting and developing new talent and boosted the careers of other future directors including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese.

Interestingly the red-clad figure in the Corman film foreshadowed a similarly dressed character in Roeg's masterpiece, Don't Look Now.

He also worked on Francois Truffaut's Farenheit 451, which was notable for the bright hues in which it was shot, and on John Schlesinger's 1967 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel, Far From the Madding Crowd.

The latter film won him a Bafta nomination for his lush photography of rural Dorset, forming the background to the tale of love and betrayal in a 19th Century farming community.

His first foray into directing came in somewhat controversial style, when he co-directed the film Performance alongside Donald Cammell, who had written the story.

The account of a confrontation between James Fox as a gangster and Mick Jagger as a pop star contained graphic scenes of violence and drug taking that so frightened the studio it delayed the release of the film for two years.

By the time Performance finally hit British cinema screens, Roeg had decamped to Australia for his solo directorial debut, Walkabout. It starred Jenny Agutter and his young son, Luc Roeg, as two white children escaping from their murderous father, who are befriended by an aboriginal teenager.

Roeg's shots of the desert and its wildlife produced images that one critic described as being "of almost hallucinogenic intensity", and he coupled this with his talent of improvising and mixing scenes and events to build the finished picture.

It also became infamous for the full-frontal nude shots of the 17-year-old Jenny Agutter, which caused much discussion among film censors, although they were allowed in the final release.

There was a brief excursion to Somerset in 1972 to film a documentary about the Glastonbury Fayre, then a mere embryo of what would later become the festival.

In 1973 Roeg embarked on what many consider his most notable film, Don't Look Now, a psychological thriller based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier.

Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland play a young couple who move to Venice following the drowning of their small daughter.

They meet two elderly psychics who claim to have seen their daughter. Meanwhile, images of a figure hooded in red, the colour their daughter was wearing when she died, flit across the background.

The film was notable for an extremely graphic sex scene between the two main characters which Roeg deliberately intercut with scenes of the couple getting ready to go out after their tryst to get it past the film censors, although it received an X certificate in the UK.

This fragmented style of editing was used throughout the film, adding to the build-up towards the horrific climax. In many ways it was the epitome of Roeg's style: the disdain for storyboards; the love of improvisation and a jigsaw of images. It won him a Bafta nomination.

Released in British cinemas with The Wicker Man as the B-movie, it provided a treat of a double bill for lovers of mystery and the macabre.

Don't Look Now was the highest point in Roeg's career although he went on to make many more films.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, starring David Bowie as an extraterrestrial, was full of the stunning images for which Roeg had become famous but the story was uneven. He was not helped by the fact that Bowie was at the height of his addiction to cocaine.

Critics were not impressed at the time although, as is the way of these things, it has since attained something of a cult status.

Roeg's next film, Bad Timing, starring Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell, whom Roeg subsequently married, was again notable for its imagery but the scenes of sexual perversion persuaded the distributors, Rank, not to show it in their own cinemas, despite a considerable investment in the filming.

Roeg's driven nature came to the fore when he shot for 24 hours without giving anyone a break, prompting Garfunkel and most of the crew to threaten a walkout.

A follow-up, Eureka, starring Gene Hackman, suffered a similar fate when its main backers, MGM, complained that Roeg had not delivered the film they expected, saying a taut thriller had become a boring murder mystery.

Castaway was based on a book by Lucy Irvine, who had famously accepted an invitation to spend a year on a desert island with a man she had never met. While the lush tropical landscape allowed Roeg to show his mastery of colour, the creaking plot and one-dimensional performances from Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe saw it sink at the box office.

His take on the Roald Dahl story, The Witches, released in 1990, was entertaining enough, particularly the over-the-top performance by Angelica Houston, but it failed to fully showcase Roeg's talents as a film-maker.

There were a number of unremarkable films including a TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and, bizarrely, an erotic film for cable TV, Full Body Massage.

In 2007 his adaptation of the Fay Weldon novel Puffball, a tale of black magic in rural Ireland, became his last major film. Rita Tushingham and Miranda Richardson did their best but it did nothing to reach the heights of Roeg's best work.

Nicolas Roeg was both a fine cinematographer and inventive director, who stamped his own unique look on the films that he made. One critic described him as both a magician and a juggler.

"I've never storyboarded anything," he once said. "I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans."

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34603072

[harrybarracuda]

Ricky Jay, ‘Boogie Nights’ and ‘Magnolia’ Actor, Dies at 72




Ricky Jay, a character actor known for his roles in such films as “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “The Spanish Prisoner,” has died. He was 72.
“I am sorry to share that my remarkable friend, teacher, collaborator and coconspirator is gone,” tweeted Michael Weber, Jay’s partner in the Deceptive Practices consulting firm, which advises movie, TV and theater projects on various illusions and magic secrets needed during their productions. Among the films they consulted on were “The Prestige,” “The Illusionist” and “Oceans Thirteen.”
He was also credited as “Illusion Wheelchair Designer” for “Forrest Gump” — it was Jay and CGI specialists who made it appear as if Gary Sinise’s wheelchair-bond character Lt. Dan was a double-amputee.

In addition to guest starring roles in numerous TV shows, including “Deadwood,” “Lie to Me,” Flashforward” and “The X-Files,” Jay was an accomplished magician and an expert card technician, and is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records for throwing a playing card 190-feet at 90 mph.

https://www.thewrap.com/ricky-jay-bo...actor-dies-72/

[harrybarracuda]

Bernardo Bertolucci, Oscar-Winning Director of ‘The Last Emperor,’ Dies




Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic “The Last Emperor” won nine Oscars and who influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris,” in which he explored politics and sexuality through personal storytelling and audacious camera work, has died.
He was 77. His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said that Bertolucci died at 7 a.m. Monday from cancer.
Italy’s greatest auteur of his generation, Bertolucci managed to work both in Europe and Hollywood, though his relationship with the studios had its ups and downs. But even when he operated within the studio system, Bertolucci always managed to make films that were considered projections of his inner world.
“The Last Emperor,” an adaptation of the autobiography of China’s last imperial ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning every category in which it had been nominated, including best picture and best director. With it, Bertolucci became the first and only Italian to win the Oscar for best director. “The Last Emperor” is among the movies that have won the most Academy Awards and was also the first Western epic about China made with the Chinese government’s cooperation.

https://variety.com/2018/film/global...or-1203036077/

[bobo746]

Bonita Mabo, prominent Indigenous rights activist, dies days after receiving accolade


Mabo was the wife of Eddie Mabo and worked alongside him in the pursuit of Indigenous land rights.
Just days ago she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from James Cook University for her contribution to social justice and human rights.
"It's a big loss for us all,"Indigenous WA senator Patrick Dodson said.
"I think Australia needs to honour people like Mrs Mabo who stood, to some degree, in the shadows of her husband, but who was the backbone and the steel that helped he and many others to continue the struggles.
"A person of great note; a great Australian and great contribution to the cause of justice to all.
"It's a sad day. It's a big loss for all of us. But she is a person who comes in the vain of the very recent recognition that 'because of her, we can do things'."
In a statement, The Australian South Sea Islander Alliance said she would "be greatly missed".
"Aunty Bonita's contribution to social justice and human rights for First Nations People and the Australian South Sea Islander recognition was monumental and relentless," the statement read.

https://www.xxx.xxx.xx/news/2018-11-26/bonita-mabo-dies-days-after-human-rights-accolade/10555496

[harrybarracuda]

Gloria Katz, ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘Temple of Doom’ Screenwriter, Dies at 76




Gloria Katz, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter who co-wrote “American Graffiti” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” died Sunday following a battle with ovarian cancer. She was 76.


Born in Los Angeles in 1942, Katz attended UC Berkeley and UCLA. She co-wrote “Graffiti” with her husband Willard Huyck and director George Lucas. The three went on to win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay, and were nominated for an Academy Award.

“Graffiti” was the beginning of a long association between the couple and George Lucas, which continued when Katz and Huyck worked uncredited as script doctors on “Star Wars.”

The pair later co-wrote the Steven Spielberg-directed “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Howard the Duck,” directed by Huyck, and “Radioland Murders,” all three of which were Lucasfilm productions.
Other films Katz co-wrote include “Lucky Lady” (1975), “French Postcards” (1979), and “Best Defense” (1982).


“My friend Gloria Katz just passed away. She was the producer writer of #HowardtheDuck she was funny and wry and beautiful,” wrote “Howard the Duck” actress Lea Thompson on Twitter. “She also worked on #americangraffiti and #StarWars this photo is from one of the long nights of shooting. #Rip Gloria. And thanks.”

“Very sad news to report tonight. Gloria Katz, who wrote INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM for us with her husband Willard Huyck, has passed awa,” Amblin Entertainment said on Twitter. “Our deepest condolences to Mr. Huyck and loved ones.”

Katz was also on the board of the WGA and an advisor at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. She is survived by Huyck, who she married in 1969, and their daughter, Rebecca.

https://www.thewrap.com/gloria-katz-...er-dies-at-76/

[harrybarracuda]

George H.W. Bush, America’s 41st president, dies at 94




HOUSTON — George H.W. Bush, a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term, has died. He was 94.


The World War II hero, who also presided during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final months of the Cold War, died late Friday night, said family spokesman Jim McGrath. His wife of more than 70 years, Barbara Bush, died in April 2018.


The son of a senator and father of a president, Bush was the man with the golden resume who rose through the political ranks: from congressman to U.N. ambassador, Republican Party chairman to envoy to China, CIA director to two-term vice president under the hugely popular Ronald Reagan. The 1991 Gulf War stoked his popularity. But Bush would acknowledge that he had trouble articulating "the vision thing," and he was haunted by his decision to break a stern, solemn vow he made to voters: "Read my lips. No new taxes."


He lost his bid for re-election to Bill Clinton in a campaign in which businessman H. Ross Perot took almost 19 percent of the vote as an independent candidate. Still, he lived to see his son, George W., twice elected to the presidency — only the second father-and-son chief executives, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.


After his 1992 defeat, Bush complained that media-created "myths" gave voters a mistaken impression that he did not identify with the lives of ordinary Americans. He decided he lost because he "just wasn't a good enough communicator."


Once out of office, Bush was content to remain on the sidelines, except for an occasional speech or paid appearance and visits abroad. He backed Clinton on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had its genesis during his own presidency. He visited the Middle East, where he was revered for his defense of Kuwait. And he returned to China, where he was welcomed as "an old friend" from his days as the U.S. ambassador there.


He later teamed with Clinton to raise tens of millions of dollars for victims of a 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005. During their wide-ranging travels, the political odd couple grew close.


"Who would have thought that I would be working with Bill Clinton, of all people?" Bush quipped in October 2005.


In his post-presidency, Bush's popularity rebounded with the growth of his reputation as a fundamentally decent and well-meaning leader who, although he was not a stirring orator or a dreamy visionary, was a steadfast humanitarian. Elected officials and celebrities of both parties publicly expressed their fondness.


After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush quickly began building an international military coalition that included other Arab states. After liberating Kuwait, he rejected suggestions that the U.S. carry the offensive to Baghdad, choosing to end the hostilities a mere 100 hours after the start of the ground war.


"That wasn't our objective," he told The Associated Press in 2011 from his office just a few blocks from his Houston home. "The good thing about it is there was so much less loss of human life than had been predicted and indeed than we might have feared."


But the decisive military defeat did not lead to the regime's downfall, as many in the administration had hoped.


"I miscalculated," acknowledged Bush. His legacy was dogged for years by doubts about the decision not to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was eventually ousted in 2003, in the war led by Bush's son that was followed by a long, bloody insurgency.


George H.W. Bush entered the White House in 1989 with a reputation as a man of indecision and indeterminate views. One newsmagazine suggested he was a "wimp."


But his work-hard, play-hard approach to the presidency won broad public approval. He held more news conferences in most months than Reagan did in most years.


The Iraq crisis of 1990-91 brought out all the skills Bush had honed in a quarter-century of politics and public service.


After winning United Nations support and a green light from a reluctant Congress, Bush unleashed a punishing air war against Iraq and a five-day ground juggernaut that sent Iraqi forces reeling in disarray back to Baghdad. He basked in the biggest outpouring of patriotism and pride in America's military since World War II, and his approval ratings soared to nearly 90 percent.


The other battles he fought as president, including a war on drugs and a crusade to make American children the best educated in the world, were not so decisively won.


He rode into office pledging to make the United States a "kinder, gentler" nation and calling on Americans to volunteer their time for good causes — an effort he said would create "a thousand points of light."


It was Bush's violation of a different pledge, the no-new-taxes promise, that helped sink his bid for a second term. He abandoned the idea in his second year, cutting a deficit-reduction deal that angered many congressional Republicans and contributed to GOP losses in the 1990 midterm elections.


An avid outdoorsman who took Theodore Roosevelt as a model, Bush sought to safeguard the environment and signed the first improvements to the Clean Air Act in more than a decade. It was activism with a Republican cast, allowing polluters to buy others' clean-air credits and giving industry flexibility on how to meet tougher goals on smog.


He also signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act to ban workplace discrimination against people with disabilities and require improved access to public places and transportation.


Bush failed to rein in the deficit, which had tripled to $3 trillion under Reagan and galloped ahead by as much as $300 billion a year under Bush, who put his finger on it in his inauguration speech: "We have more will than wallet."


Seven years of economic growth ended in mid-1990, just as the Gulf crisis began to unfold. Bush insisted the recession would be "short and shallow," and lawmakers did not even try to pass a jobs bill or other relief measures.


Bush's true interests lay elsewhere, outside the realm of nettlesome domestic politics. "I love coping with the problems in foreign affairs," he told a child who asked what he liked best about being president.


He operated at times like a one-man State Department, on the phone at dawn with his peers — Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, Francois Mitterrand of France, Germany's Helmut Kohl.


Communism began to crumble on his watch, with the Berlin Wall coming down, the Warsaw Pact disintegrating and the Soviet satellites falling out of orbit.


He seized leadership of the NATO alliance with a bold and ultimately successful proposal for deep troop and tank cuts in Europe. Huge crowds cheered him on a triumphal tour through Poland and Hungary.


Bush's invasion of Panama in December 1989 was a military precursor of the Gulf War: a quick operation with a resoundingly superior American force. But in Panama, the troops seized dictator Manuel Noriega and brought him back to the United States in chains to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.


Months after the Gulf War, Washington became engrossed in a different sort of confrontation over one of Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, a little-known federal appeals court judge, was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague named Anita Hill. His confirmation hearings exploded into a national spectacle, sparking an intense debate over race, gender and the modern workplace. Thomas was eventually confirmed.


In the closing days of the 1992 campaign, Bush fought the impression that he was distant and disconnected, and he seemed to struggle against the younger, more empathetic Clinton.


During a campaign visit to a grocers' convention, Bush reportedly expressed amazement when shown an electronic checkout scanner. Critics seized on the moment, saying it indicated that the president had become disconnected from voters.


Later at a town-hall style debate, he paused to look at his wristwatch — a seemingly innocent glance that became freighted with deeper meaning because it seemed to reinforce the idea of a bored, impatient incumbent.


In the same debate, Bush became confused by a woman's question about whether the deficit had affected him personally. Clinton, with apparent ease, left his seat, walked to the edge of the stage to address the woman and offered a sympathetic answer.


Bush said the pain of losing in 1992 was eased by the warm reception he received after leaving office.


"I lost in '92 because people still thought the economy was in the tank, that I was out of touch and I didn't understand that," he said in an AP interview shortly before the dedication of his presidential library in 1997. "The economy wasn't in the tank, and I wasn't out of touch, but I lost. I couldn't get through this hue and cry for 'change, change, change' and 'The economy is horrible, still in recession.'


George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into the New England elite, a world of prep schools, mansions and servants seemingly untouched by the Great Depression.


His father, Prescott Bush, the son of an Ohio steel magnate, made his fortune as an investment banker and later served 10 years as a senator from Connecticut.


George H.W. Bush enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday in 1942, right out of prep school. He returned home to marry his 19-year-old sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, daughter of the publisher of McCall's magazine, in January 1945. They were the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history. She died on April 17, 2018.


Lean and athletic at 6-foot-2, Bush became a war hero while still a teenager. One of the youngest pilots in the Navy, he flew 58 missions off the carrier USS San Jacinto.


He had to ditch one plane in the Pacific and was shot down on Sept. 2, 1944, while completing a bombing run against a Japanese radio tower. An American submarine rescued Bush. His two crewmates perished. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery.


After the war, Bush took just 2½ years to graduate from Yale, then headed west in 1948 to the oil fields of West Texas. Bush and partners helped found Zapata Petroleum Corp. in 1953. Six years later, he moved to Houston and became active in the Republican Party.


In politics, he showed the same commitment he displayed in business, advancing his career through loyalty and subservience.


He was first elected to Congress in 1966 and served two terms. President Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to the United Nations, and after the 1972 election, named him chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush struggled to hold the party together as Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, then became ambassador to China and CIA chief in the Ford administration.


Bush made his first bid for president in 1980 and won the Iowa caucuses, but Reagan went on to win the nomination.


In the 1988 presidential race, Bush trailed the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, by as many as 17 points that summer. He did little to help himself by picking Dan Quayle, a lightly regarded junior senator from Indiana, as a running mate.


But Bush soon became an aggressor, stressing patriotic themes and flailing Dukakis as an out-of-touch liberal. He carried 40 states, becoming the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.


He took office with the humility that was his hallmark.


"Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that," he said at his inauguration. "But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds."


Bush approached old age with gusto, celebrating his 75th and 80th birthdays by skydiving over College Station, Texas, the home of his presidential library. He did it again on his 85th birthday in 2009, parachuting near his oceanfront home in Kennebunkport, Maine. He used his presidential library at Texas A&M University as a base for keeping active in civic life.


He became the patriarch of one of the nation's most prominent political families. In addition to George W. becoming president, another son, Jeb, was elected Florida governor in 1998 and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.


The other Bush children are sons Neil and Marvin and daughter Dorothy Bush LeBlond. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953, a few weeks before her fourth birthday.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/no...nt-dies-at-94/

[Cujo]

A lot there Trump could take note of.