2016 Obituaries

What, Me worry?...

Mad magazine cartoonist Jack Davis dies aged 91
Thu, 28 Jul 2016 - Cartoonist Jack Davis, the "long-time legendary" artist on the US magazine Mad, dies at the age of 91.

 

ESPN's John Saunders dies at 61.....

ESPN announced Wednesday that longtime anchor John Saunders died. Saunders was 61.

Saunders, a familiar face during ESPN’s college football coverage, joined the network in 1986. In addition to his college football hosting duties, Saunders hosted The Sports Reporters on Sunday morning. During his time at ESPN, Saunders was involved in the network’s coverage of the NBA, NFL, college basketball, NHL and ABC’s coverage of the 1995 World Series.

There were few things Saunders hadn’t done at ESPN, which is why he became one of the network’s most recognizable and trusted personalities.

A native of Canada, Saunders also served as the television play-by-play broadcaster for the Toronto Raptors’ local TV coverage from 1995-2001. Many media members agreed with Skipper’s sentiments about Saunders’ influence and personality.....snip~


http://sports.yahoo.com/news/espns-john-saunders-dies-at-61-152007101.html

Prayers for his family and friends.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainmen...nal-on-air-with-news-john-saunders-death.html


big loss for the sports world

 

Matt Roberts, former guitarist of 3 Doors Down, dies of apparent overdose...

Founder and former guitarist of 3 Doors Down dies at 38
Sunday 21st August, 2016. - Former 3 Doors Down guitarist, Matt Roberts, has died of an apparent drug overdose, reports TMZ.

 

No one mentioned John McLaughlin. I just wrote 60 Facebook posts about him (PhilCole).
Also Arthur Hiller, directorof Love Story died at 92. That's sad but don't anyone say you're sorry.

 

Electric Folk Music's greatest violinist

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/06/03/dave-swarbrick-musician--obituary/


and

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obitu...-with-an-australian-girl-20160610-gpg4r8.html

 

Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolff:

Edward Albee, audacious American playwright, dies at 88
The Hollywood Reporter
SUZY EVANS
Sep 16th 2016 8:03PM
Edward Albee, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who ushered in a new era of American drama with such plays as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Zoo Story, Three Tall Women and A Delicate Balance, has died. He was 88.

The playwright died at his home on Long Island, his assistant Jackob Holder confirmed to the Associated Press. No other details of his death were immediately available.

Influenced by Bertolt Brecht and the Theater of the Absurd, Albee invited the audience into his characters' psyches in a way that challenged both topical and structural theatrical convention. From the wacky-turned-dangerous dinner party games of 1962's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the bestiality of 2002's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, the playwright eradicated the illusion of normalcy by placing seemingly ordinary people in far-fetched situations.

See images of the award-winning playwright through the years:

SEE PHOTOS
16 PHOTOS


"That's what happens in plays, yes? The (*)(*)(*)(*) hits the fan," Albee said in an interview with Playbill in 2002.

Albee was presented with the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for A Delicate Balance in 1967, Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1994. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably his most well-known play and Broadway debut, was selected for the Pulitzer in 1963, but an advisory committee overruled the nomination because of the play's use of profanity and sexual themes, and no award for theater was presented that year.

It did capture the Tony Award for best play, as did The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, and Albee was awarded a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2005. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters handed him the Gold Medal in Drama in 1980, and in 1996, he received the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts.

"Among our few genuinely great playwrights, Edward Albee seems to be the most fearless and the most successful at discovering difficulty," fellow playwright Tony Kushner said at the PEN World Voices Gala in 2012. "Certainly, he's the one important American playwright who has made the investigation of the meaning of dramatic form, the structure of dramatic language and the contract between play and audience a substantial aspect of his life's work."

Born Edward Harvey and adopted when he was 18 days old by Reed and Francis Albee, he grew up as Edward Franklin Albee III in Larchmont, N.Y. Albee was expelled from three schools, culminating in his dismissal from Trinity College in 1947, and he later moved to Greenwich Village. Many hypothesize that Virginia Woolf took inspiration from Albee's collegiate experience, but the playwright denied autobiographical allegations.

"I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself," he said in a 2013 interview with The Believer. "People don't know anything about themselves. They shouldn't write about themselves."

However, Albee did admit that A Delicate Balance came from his experience growing up with a "right wing, rich, prejudiced family" with whom he never saw eye to eye. "I wasn't growing up to be what they wanted," he said in an interview with The Dramatists Guild. "They wanted a young corrupt CEO, a lawyer or a doctor. They didn't want a writer. Good God ...; I wasn't going to be what they had bought, so to speak, which gave me great objectivity about them."

Albee said he decided he was a writer at age 6 and began his career by dabbling in poetry and novels, neither of which garnered much success. He didn't author his first play, The Zoo Story, until he was 30. The one-act premiered in Berlin after being rejected by American producers. Albee continued writing one-acts with The Sandbox in 1959 and The American Dream in 1960 before his three-act opus Virginia Woolf premiered in 1962.

"I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life," Albee told The Paris Review after Virginia Woolf debuted and as he was writing A Delicate Balance. "The involvement is terribly intense. I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache ...; The involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it."

Hollywood came calling early for Albee, with Mike Nichols directing Ernest Lehman's Oscar-nominated adaptation of 1966's Virginia Woolf film that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Albee was skeptical of Taylor's ability to play Martha (Uta Hagen had toplined the play) but ended up being impressed with her Academy Award-winning performance as well as the film.

In 1973, Katharine Hepburn starred in director Tony Richardson's film version of A Delicate Balance, for which Albee is credited with the screenplay. (Albee muse Marian Seldes had starred in the play.)

Virginia Woolf has been revived three times on Broadway, with Kathleen Turner, Colleen Dewhurst and, most recently, Amy Morton as Martha. The latest production won the Tony for best revival of a play in 2013, with direction by Pam MacKinnon.

MacKinnon also directed Albee's latest Broadway revival of A Delicate Balance, starring Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Martha Plimpton and Bob Balaban. "If you can get over the Edward Albee myth and intimidation, he's very approachable," MacKinnon said in an interview with American Theatre.

Albee was openly gay, and his longtime partner Jonathan Thomas died of bladder cancer in 2005. Albee avoided the classification of a gay writer. "A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self," he said when accepting the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011. "I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay."

When this remark was met with critique, he told NPR, "Maybe I'm being a little troublesome about this, but so many writers who are gay are expected to behave like gay writers, and I find that is such a limitation and such a prejudicial thing that I fight against it whenever I can."

Though known for his temper and irascible nature, Albee also was a famous champion of young playwrights. In 1963, he founded the New Playwrights Unit Workshop (renamed Playwrights 66 in 1966), and the organization provided emerging writers, including Terrence McNally, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard and John Guare, some of the first opportunities to have their work produced at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.

"If you have the ability to help other people in the arts, it's your responsibility to do so," Albee told Newsday in 2005. Playwrights 66 folded after eight years, but Albee started the Edward F. Albee Foundation in 1967, and it operates "The Barn" in Montauk, N.Y., providing residencies for writers and visual artists. He also served as a distinguished professor of playwriting at University of Houston.

Will Eno, an Albee protege who had a residency with the Foundation in 1996, sat down with him for The Dramatists Guild series The Legacy Project, in which Albee reflected on his life and influence.

"If you don't live on the precipice, right close to the edge, you're wasting your time," Albee said. "I hope that my plays are useful in that sense, that they try to persuade people to live right on the edge dangerously and fully. Because you only do it once."

 

http://www.newsweek.com/hanoi-hannah-vietnam-propaganda-dies-87-505704?rx=us
WORLD
'SMOOTH AS SILK' VIETNAMESE PROPAGANDIST 'HANOI HANNAH' DIES AT 87
BY JEFF STEIN ON 10/3/16 AT 1:44 PM


WORLDVIETNAM WARPROPAGANDAHANOI
“Hanoi Hannah,” whose propaganda broadcasts alternately amused and enraged American soldiers fighting in South Vietnam, died Sunday at her home in Ho Chi Minh City. She was 87.

“Hannah,” whose true name was Trịnh Thị Ngo, offered war-weary American GIs a nostalgic mix of folk songs, lists of U.S. killed and captured and news of antiwar protests back home in a soft, dulcet delivery that was instantly recognizable. Long before the war’s end in 1975, she was as famous as her World War II Axis predecessors, Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw. Robin Williams referenced her in Good Morning Vietnam, the 1987 comedy loosely based on U.S. Armed Forces Radio Service DJ Adrian Cronauer.

“How are you, GI Joe?” went a typical 1967 broadcast. “It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing about a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.”

Hanoi Hannah,' the voice of North Vietnamese wartime propaganda broadcasts to American GIs, stands on a street in Ho Chi Minh City in 1997. Hannah, whose real name was Trịnh Thị Ngo, died Sunday at 87.
REUTERS

Sometimes the soldiers laughed at her broadcasts. Other times they threw empty beer cans at the radio, according to Don North, an ABC newsman in Vietnam during the war.

“Her job was to chill and frighten, not to charm and seduce,” North wrote years later. “Her voice was as smooth as silk, her English impeccable, and as North Vietnam's premier propagandist, ‘Hanoi Hannah’ tried to convince American G.I.'s that the war was immoral, that they should lay down their arms and go home.”

“The message I wanted to deliver to the U.S. soldiers was that they were fighting for an unjust war and would die in vain,” Ngo told the Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien in 2008.



After North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in April 1975, Ngo was invited to join the city’s new communist-controlled TV station but she declined, saying she wanted to spend more time with her ailing husband.

According to the People’s Public Security newspaper, she had recently turned down an interview request from an Australian filmmaker who is making a documentary on the Voice of Vietnam’s wartime activities.

‘“She lived a life in the press during wartime, and then after the war, after all the noise and attention, she just wanted to leave it all behind,” a friend was quoted saying. “Her only desire was to find her way ‘back home.’”

She will be buried in Long An Province, west of Ho Chi Minh City, site of some of the war’s fiercest fighting.

 

USS Arizona Survivor of Pearl Harbor Attack Dies...

One of Last USS Arizona Survivors of Pearl Harbor Attack Dies
Oct 07, 2016 -- One of six remaining crew members who served on board the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died.

See also:

75 Years Later, Seaman Killed in Pearl Harbor to Return Home
Oct 07, 2016 — Three-quarters of a century after he was killed during the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the remains of a young Navy sailor finally are heading home to Kansas.

 

Chess Records co-founder Phil Chess dies at 95...

Phil Chess, Pioneering Blues and Rock Exec, Dead at 95
20 Oct.`16 - Prolific record producer and Chess Records co-founder helped introduced Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Etta James to world

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-hayden-famed-1960s-anti-war-activist-dies-060614324--politics.html

Tom Hayden, activist known for Vietnam protests, dies at 76

LINDA DEUTSCH and TAREK HAMADA October 24, 2016

View photos
FILE - In this Dec. 6, 1973 file photo, political activist Tom Hayden, husband of Jane Fonda, tells newsmen in Los Angeles that he believes public support was partially responsible for the decision not to send him and others of the Chicago 7 to jail for contempt. Hayden, the famed 1960s anti-war activist who moved beyond his notoriety as a Chicago 8 defendant to become a California legislator, author and lecturer, has died at age 76. His wife, Barbara Williams, says Hayden died on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016, in Santa Monica of a long illness. (AP Photo/George Brich, File)
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SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Tom Hayden, a '60s anti-war activist whose name became forever linked with the celebrated Chicago 7 trial, Vietnam War protests and his ex-wife Jane Fonda, has died. He was 76.

He died on Sunday after a long illness, said his wife, Barbara Williams, noting that he suffered a stroke in 2015.

Hayden, once denounced as a traitor by his detractors, won election to the California Assembly and Senate where he served for almost two decades as a progressive force on such issues as the environment and education. He was the only one of the radical Chicago 7 defendants to win such distinction in the mainstream political world.

He remained an enduring voice against war and spent his later years as a prolific writer and lecturer advocating for reform of America's political institutions.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti praised Hayden. "A political giant and dear friend has passed. Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known. RIP, Tom," Garcetti said Sunday night on his Twitter account.

Hayden wrote or edited 19 books, including "Reunion," a memoir of his path to protest and a rumination on the political upheavals of the '60s.

"Rarely, if ever, in American history has a generation begun with higher ideals and experienced greater trauma than those who lived fully the short time from 1960 to 1968," he wrote.

Hayden was there at the start. In 1960, while a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was involved in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then dedicated to desegregating the South. By 1962, when he began drafting the landmark Port Huron Statement, SDS and Hayden were dedicated to changing the world.

Hayden was fond of comparing the student movement that followed to the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In 1968, he helped organize anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent and resulted in the notorious Chicago 7 trial. It began as the Chicago 8 trial, but one defendant, Bobby Seale, was denied the lawyer of his choice, was bound and gagged by the judge and ultimately received a separate trial.

After a circus-like trial, Hayden and three others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite riot. The convictions were later overturned, and an official report deemed the violence "a police riot."

Thomas Emmet Hayden was born Dec. 11, 1939, in Royal Oak, Michigan, to middle-class parents. At Michigan, he took up political causes including the civil rights movement. He wrote fiery editorials for the campus newspaper and contemplated a career in journalism. But upon graduation, he turned down a newspaper job. As he wrote in his memoir, "I didn't want to report on the world; I wanted to change it."

He joined the fledgling Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, went freedom-riding during civil rights protests in the South and was beaten and briefly jailed in Mississippi and Georgia. He married a fellow activist, Sandra "Casey" Cason.

Yearning for a more influential role, Hayden returned to Ann Arbor, where he was enlisted by the SDS to draft the Port Huron Statement, a call to action he hoped would spread to the rest of the country.

In 1965, Hayden made his first visit to North Vietnam with an unauthorized delegation. In 1967, he returned to Hanoi with another group and was asked by North Vietnamese leaders to bring three prisoners of war back to the United States.

Firmly committed to the anti-war movement, Hayden participated in sit-ins at Columbia University, then began traveling the country to promote a rally in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In the interim, a single event galvanized him — the 1968 assassination of his friend, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in Los Angeles. "I went from Robert Kennedy's coffin into a very bleak and bitter political view," Hayden told the Associated Press in 1988.

In 1971, Hayden met actress Jane Fonda, a latecomer to the protest movement. After he heard her give an eloquent anti-war speech in 1972, Hayden said they connected and became a couple. He was divorced from Cason. Fonda was divorced from director Roger Vadim and had a daughter, Vanessa Vadim.

Hayden and Fonda were married for 17 years and had a son, Troy.

With heavy financial support from Fonda, Hayden plunged into California politics in the late 1970s. He formed the Campaign for Economic Democracy and was elected to the Assembly in 1982.

In 1992, Hayden won election to the state Senate advocating for environmental and educational issues. By then, he and Fonda were divorced.

Hayden went on to marry actress Barbara Williams, and they had a son, Liam.

In 1994, Hayden was defeated in a run for the state governorship, and he lost a bid to become mayor of Los Angeles.

After leaving public office, Hayden wrote and traveled extensively, lecturing, teaching and speaking out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also an advocate for animals, and in 2012 he lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to preserve a piece of legislation known as Hayden's Law, which he had authored to protect shelter animals from premature euthanasia.

___

Deutsch is a retired AP special correspondent who contributed to this report. Hamada contributed from Phoenix.

 

Who else remembers the Janet Reno dance party skits on SNL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/us/janet-reno-dead.html?_r=0

Janet Reno, First Woman to Serve as U.S. Attorney General, Dies at 78
By CARL HULSENOV. 7, 2016
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Janet Reno, Former U.S. Attorney General, Dies
Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as United States attorney general, died on Monday at 78. She died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to her family. By MEGAN SPECIA on Publish Date November 7, 2016. Photo by Barry Thumma/Associated Press. Watch in Times Video »
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Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Clinton presidency, died on Monday at her home in Miami-Dade County, Fla. She was 78.

Her sister, Margaret Hurchalla, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in November 1995, while Ms. Reno was still in office.

Ms. Reno’s tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Tex., in 1993, and in 2000 the government’s seizing of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the center of an international custody battle and a political tug of war.

In those moments and others, Ms. Reno was applauded for displaying integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticized. Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of fund-raising improprieties in the White House.


After leaving office, she mounted a surprise though unsuccessful bid in Florida in 2002 to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, amid the resentment of Cuban-Americans in South Florida over her negotiating for the return of Elián to Cuba.

Ms. Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years. She was a latecomer to the team, and her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House.

Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the so-called Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Mr. Clinton’s sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment.

Mr. Clinton and his allies thought that Ms. Reno was too quick to refer to special counsels in the Lewinsky matter and other cases of suspect administration behavior. The president let her dangle in the public eye for weeks before announcing in December 1996, after his resounding re-election, that she would remain for his second term.

Photo

Janet Reno in May 1993, . Credit David Burnett/Contact Press Images
Ms. Reno was never a natural fit in Washington’s backslapping, competitive culture. At weekly news conferences, held in the barrel-vaulted conference room outside her office in the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, she was fond of telling reporters that she would “do the right thing” on legal issues and judge them according to “the law and the facts.”

Imposing at 6-foot-1, awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, she became a regular foil for late-night comics and a running gag on “Saturday Night Live.” But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image.

The comedy could not obscure her law-enforcement accomplishments. Ms. Reno presided over the Justice Department in a time of economic growth, falling crime rates and mounting security threats to the nation by forces both foreign and domestic.

Under Ms. Reno, the agency initiated prosecutions in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century.

The Reno Justice Department also prosecuted spies like the C.I.A. mole Aldrich H. Ames; it filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a milestone in the new-technology era; and it sued the tobacco industry to reclaim federal health care dollars spent on treating illnesses caused by smoking.

Ms. Reno was a strong advocate of guaranteeing federal protection to women seeking abortions and safeguarding abortion clinics that were under threat.

But in some areas she seemed conflicted about the law. She opposed the death penalty, for example, but repeatedly authorized her prosecutors to ask juries to impose it.

When she took office, she endorsed the use of independent counsels to investigate administration figures. But she later testified against renewing the law governing their use, saying it did nothing to take politics out of the inquiries.

Before becoming attorney general, Ms. Reno was the Dade County state attorney for 14 years, when the Miami area was growing rapidly and experiencing rising drug-related crime, widening racial divisions, demoralizing police corruption and waves of immigration from Cuba.

Photo

Janet Reno testifying before a House panel on the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

 

https://www.yahoo.com/tv/pbs-newshours-gwen-ifill-dead-192006327.html

PBS Newshour's Gwen Ifill Dead at 61
Kimberly Roots 2 hours 18 minutes ago Comments Sign in to like Reblog on Tumblr Share Tweet Email
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PBS political reporter and vice-presidential-debate moderator Gwen Ifill passed away from cancer Monday in hospice care. She was 61.

In April, Ifill took a leave from her position as the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and co-anchor of PBS Newshour to address some health issues. At the time, a representative from the network said doctors were “encouraged with her progress, and she hopes to be back in the saddle as soon as possible.”

As late as early November, Ifill was at least in consideration for Election Night coverage: Political analyst Jeff Greenfield tweeted on Nov. 5 that he was looking forward to being on-air with Ifill and PBS’ Judy Woodruff on the big night. On Nov. 7, PBS updated its website to note Ifill’s upcoming absence.

Throughout her career, Ifill covered seven presidential campaigns and moderated two vice-presidential debates: in 2004 between Dick Cheney and John Edwards, and in 2008 between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.


For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS.

Prior to joining PBS, Ifill was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News and White House correspondent for The New York Times. She also reported for The Washington Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American.

“Gwen was a standard bearer for courage, fairness and integrity in an industry going through seismic change. She was a mentor to so many across the industry and her professionalism was respected across the political spectrum. She was a journalist’s journalist and set an example for all around her,” PBS NewsHour executive producer Sara Just said in a statement obtained by Politico. “So many people in the audience felt that they knew and adored her. She had a tremendous combination of warmth and authority. She was stopped on the street routinely by people who just wanted to give her a hug and considered her a friend after years of seeing her on TV. We will forever miss her terribly.”

 

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/17/politics/melvin-laird-obituary/
Draft-ending former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird dies

By Madison Park, CNN
Updated 3:03 AM ET, Thu November 17, 2016
During a news briefing at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird points to a location in Laos on a map of Indochina. (Photo by © Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
During a news briefing at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird points to a location in Laos on a map of Indochina. (Photo by © Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Story highlights
Melvin Laird, secretary of defense from 1969 to 1974, has died
Laird leaves legacy of change in Vietnam War policy and ending the draft

(CNN)Melvin Laird, the former secretary of defense who ended the unpopular military draft and initiated withdrawal of US troops from the Vietnam War, died Wednesday.

Laird was 94.
In 1969, at the peak of the Vietnam War, Laird joined President Richard Nixon's administration as the secretary of defense.
Before joining the Cabinet, Laird had been an influential Republican congressman representing Wisconsin for 16 years with an expertise in defense and military matters. He was a well-respected World World II veteran and Purple Heart recipient.
Laird had become a vocal critic of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara's policy on the Vietnam War.
Vietnam War's final chaotic moments

Vietnam War's final chaotic moments 01:37
Laird had several goals as secretary of defense. He wanted to end the draft, disengage from the war and reach a peace settlement.
"Wars are easy to enter into," he said in 2010. "They're very difficult to get out of."
Laird pushed a policy of "Vietnamization," which meant withdrawing US forces while equipping and training South Vietnam's military.
He also instituted sweeping changes in US foreign and defense policy, most importantly by shifting the US military from a conscripted army to an all-volunteer force.
Laird said it was a matter of equity. "It is pretty much an economic issue because conscript labor -- paying young men in the military very low rates -- was unfair."
"Yes, it was a difficult fight ... but I maintained and by the time I left the White House, there was no draft."
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter praised Laird's contributions in a statement issued Wednesday.
Vietnam POWs return home

Vietnam POWs return home 02:01
"Secretary Laird led the Defense Department through a time of great change in the world and within our department. Through it all, he demonstrated an unfailing commitment to protecting our country, strengthening our military, and making a better world."
Laird also publicly highlighted the inhumane treatment of American prisoners of war and pushed for their return.
"Those of us who fought and those of us held prisoner in Vietnam will always have a special place in our hearts for Sec Melvin Laird," tweeted Sen. John McCain.
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John McCain ✔ @SenJohnMcCain
Those of us who fought & those of us held prisoner in #Vietnam will always have a special place in our hearts for Sec Melvin Laird. RIP.
4:11 PM - 16 Nov 2016
179 179 Retweets 570 570 likes
Laird stepped down in 1973, serving four years in the administration as he had vowed to do.
Legacy outside of Vietnam policy
Born in Omaha, Laird came from a family in which both parents had held political office. It seemed natural that he should enter politics.
He represented the Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District from 1953 to 1969.
Laird and Democrat Congressman John E. Fogarty, from Rhode Island, formed a bipartisan alliance to expand federal funding for medical research projects and institutions -- including the National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"It was a great start to what ultimately became the reward of the NIH to the nation and to the world, with its research resulting in better health care for people all over the world," Laird said in a 2014 interview.
The Laird Center for Medical Research in Wisconsin is named after him as a tribute to his health advocacy.
"His work helped shape medical research as we know it," said Dr. Susan Turney CEO of the Marshfield Clinic Health System where the Laird Center is based.
Laird had fondly looked back on his days working across the aisle with Fogarty.
"The two of us put aside our party affiliations and worked ... to prove how working together could build a national program for health research and education that would be the envy of the world," he said in a 2014 interview.

 

Soul singer Sharon Jones dies at 60...

Big-voiced Dap-Kings soul singer Sharon Jones dies at 60
November 19, 2016 -- Sharon Jones, the stout powerhouse who shepherded a soul revival despite not finding stardom until middle age, has died. She was 60.

 

Emerson, Lake and Palmer founder Greg Lake dies.....

He was 69.

LONDON (AP) — Musician Greg Lake, a prog-rock pioneer who co-founded King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, has died.

Manager Stewart Young said in a statement that Lake died Wednesday after "a long and stubborn battle with cancer."

Born in the southern English seaside town of Poole in 1947, Lake founded King Crimson with guitarist Robert Fripp in the late 1960s. The band pioneered the sprawling, ambitious genre that came to be known as progressive rock.....snip~

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news...s-at-69/ar-AAliM3c?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp

R.I.P. Greg Lake.

 

another example of the rock and roll hall of fame's bigotry against Progressive Rock

this guy was a major leaguer in rock music. As a young man few rock vocalists had his talent as a singer and as a 12 year old he wrote this gem


[video=youtube;3rYrYjAsbBw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rYrYjAsbBw[/video]

 

The 'Dead or Alive' listings often throw up some sad surprises-
http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead.nsf/pages-nf/main

 

Was suffering from stage 4 cancer when she appeared on Jeopardy...

Tributes paid to Jeopardy winner who died before quiz broadcast
Thu, 22 Dec 2016 - Tributes are paid to a US woman whose appearances on the Jeopardy quiz were broadcast after she died.

 

New competition show:
Last chance for fame!

 

George Michael from Wham! died today. I wonder how many celebrities died in 2016 now? Like around 30 would you say?

 

What a loss, and only 53.

 

This was a big one for me.

[video=youtube;iYYRH4apXDo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo[/video]

And what a wonderful tribute to Bowie this was!
[video=youtube;KaOC9danxNo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo[/video]

 

Unfortunate:

http://people.com/movies/carrie-fisher-dies/

Iconic Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher Dies at 60: 'She Was Loved by the World and She Will Be Missed Profoundly'
BY LINDSAY KIMBLE•@LEKIMBLE

POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2016 AT 12:44PM EST
Carrie Fisher, the actress best known as Star Wars‘ Princess Leia Organa, has died after suffering a heart attack. She was 60.

Family spokesman Simon Halls released a statement to PEOPLE on behalf of Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd:

“It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning,” reads the statement.

“She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly,” says Lourd. “Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”

Fisher was flying from London to Los Angeles on Friday, Dec. 23, when she went into cardiac arrest. Paramedics removed her from the flight and rushed her to a nearby hospital, where she was treated for a heart attack. She later died in the hospital.

The daughter of showbiz veteran Debbie Reynolds and entertainer Eddie Fisher, Fisher was brought up in the sometimes tumultuous world of film, theatre and television.

Escaping Hollywood in 1973, the star enrolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she spent over a year studying acting.


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Just two years later, though, the bright lights of Hollywood drew her back, and Fisher made her film debut in the Warren Beatty-lead Shampoo.

Her role in Star Wars would follow in 1977 – the experience she recently detailed in memoir, The Princess Diarist. She was only 19 when the first installment of the beloved sci-fi franchise was filmed.


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In addition to the second and third Star Wars films – and last year’s The Force Awakens – Fisher starred in 1980’s The Blues Brothers, The Man with One Red Shoe, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 and, later, When Harry Met Sally.


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Fisher wed musician Paul Simon in 1983. It was an explosive marriage, according to Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon author Peter Ames Carlin, and was cut short by swinging stages of depression, the actresses’ drug use and an array of personal insecurities. The relationship continued, though, on-and-off for several years after the pair divorced in 1984.


PAUL SIMON AND CARRIE FISHER (CREDIT: RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE)
The star’s substance abuse problem was well-known, starting at only age 13 when she first started smoking marijuana, Fisher previously told The Telegraph. She said she later dabbled in drugs like cocaine and LSD. Fisher’s addiction was largely profiled in her 1987 best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, which was later turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep.

“I never could take alcohol. I always said I was allergic to alcohol, and that’s actually a definition to alcoholism — an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind,” Fisher told the Herald-Tribune in 2013. “So I didn’t do other kinds of drugs until I was about 20. Then, by the time I was 21 it was LSD. I didn’t love cocaine, but I wanted to feel any way other than the way I did, so I’d do anything.”

In 1985, Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she told the Herald-Tribune, and subsequently became an outspoken advocate for mental health awareness.

Throughout much of the ’90s, Fisher focused on her writing career, publishing Surrender the Pink and Delusions of Grandma. In addition, Fisher reportedly helped craft the scripts for numerous Hollywood films, going uncredited, for films like The Wedding Singer, Hook and Sister Act.

Billie Lourd, Fisher’s only child, was born in July 1992. The Scream Queens star’s father, talent agent Bryan Lourd, dated Fisher for three years and is now married to Bruce Bozzi.


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In 2005, Fisher was recognized with the Women of Vision Award by the Women in Film & Video – DC. Three years later, Fisher’s Wishful Drinking autobiography was turned into a one-woman stage show and eventually an HBO documentary.


Of returning to the role that launched her career – Leia – for The Force Awakens, Fisher told PEOPLE in 2015, “I knew that something enormous was likely going to impact my life from this film and that there was absolutely no way of understanding what that was or was likely to be.”

The film – which brought Fisher back into the spotlight – earned her a nomination for the 2016 Saturn Award for best supporting actress.



Just last month, Fisher also revealed her surprising on-set affair with Star Wars costar Harrison Ford in The Princess Diarist, telling PEOPLE of the three-month fling, “It was so intense.” The memoir, which drew from Fisher’s old diaries and notebooks, brought up mixed feelings for the actress.

“I had forgotten that I’d written them, and I’ve never written diaries sort of like that,” she said. “I write when I’m upset … it was about two or three months of upset.”

Fisher added, “It was sad because I was so insecure, and it’s very raw and obviously I didn’t expect anyone — including myself, I suppose later on — to read it.”

She is survived by her mom Reynolds, daughter Lourd and beloved French bulldog, Gary.

 

After this last one, (*)(*)(*)(*) this year, seriously.