DEATH BECOMES HER: a SELECTION of OBITUARIES by MARGALIT FOX Tbook Collections

DEATH BECOMES HER: A SELECTION OF OBITUARIES BY MARGALIT FOX TBook Collections

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All of the articles in this work originally appeared in The New York Times. eISBN: 9781634614832

The New York Times Company New York, NY www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/tbooks Story Behind the Story: Margalit Fox Answers the Question: ‘Why That Life?’

BY MARGALIT FOX April 6, 2014

Margalit Fox has written more than 1,000 obituaries for The Times. Almost every day, I am given a mystery to solve — the mystery of how a life was lived, and why that life, although it has run its course, matters vitally to us all. For the past decade I have worked as an obituary news writer at The Times, most recently as a senior writer. The job — all-consuming, life-giving and never dull — is perhaps the strangest in American journalism but also one of the very best. The mystery begins 11 a.m. each day, when I report for duty in the newsroom. (I commend a career on a morning paper to anyone who, like me, is constitutionally averse to rising early.) By the time I arrive, our news assistant, Dan Slotnik, will have set the pot brewing in the makeshift departmental coffee bar we fondly call Cafe Thanatos. Arriving, my colleagues — Doug Martin, Bruce Weber and Paul Vitello — make a beeline for the pot, as do I. These are the first of the 24 cups of coffee we collectively consume each day. By the time the writers get in, the three editors — our section head, Bill McDonald, and his deputies, Jack Kadden and Peter Keepnews — are already deep in conference, reviewing the day’s submissions. Besides fielding a torrent of information emailed by families, funeral homes and publicists, and combing the paid death announcements in The Times, the editors monitor wire services like Reuters and The Associated Press, out-of- town and foreign papers and a bevy of relevant websites, trolling for the newly departed. Then the deliberations start. More than two million Americans die annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Times can publish scarcely more than 1,000 obituaries a year. As we often say to one another ruefully, running the Obituary department of The Times is like presiding over the admissions committee of the most selective college in the world. If you are a president, king or queen and you have just shuffled off this mortal coil, then you are a no-brainer. Chances are good, in fact, that we already have an advance obituary of you on file, requiring a reporter only to fill in the where, when and how before the article — long, rigorous and satisfyingly complex — appears, as if by magic, on nytimes.com and the next day in print. But while these “advances” are invaluable, a good 90 percent of my job, and that of my colleagues, comes in the form of “dailies” — the breaking-news obits that, like articles elsewhere in the paper, are reported and written on deadline in the course of a single adrenaline-fueled day. That is where the deliberations come in. Ruling yea or nay on each submission is a charge our editors take very seriously, and it is no exaggeration to say they agonize over the task. Sometimes, needing further research, they will pass a submission on to a writer knowledgeable in that area. My original training was as a cellist and a linguist, and so many departed classical musicians and linguistics professors, along with sundry others, cross my desk. A submission I still find haunting encapsulates the process perfectly. Several years ago, my editor handed me a news release sent in by the children of a man who had served at Iwo Jima. This man had been, or so the release seemed to say, one of the American servicemen who had raised the flag there in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph — the image at the center of the movie “Flags of Our Fathers.” If that were the case, he would be a natural for our pages. But a little voice in the back of my head said: Wait a minute! Haven’t we done obits on all the flag-raisers by now? A quick Internet search confirmed that of the six men in the picture — five Marines and a Navy man — three were later killed in action, and the last of the three who survived the war died in the 1990s. So who was this man on my desk? When I looked at the release a second time, I saw the family wasn’t claiming that Dad had stood on Mount Suribachi at all. He had been stationed on a ship anchored offshore, and what he had actually done, apparently, was to hand the folded flag to one of the Marines who later went up the mountain and raised it. Our man hadn’t raised the famous flag, but for a moment, anyway, he had touched it. For my editors and me, the question became this: How hard do you have to touch history, and for how long, to become history yourself? It is, at bottom, a large question about epistemology, the construction of legend and the creation of posterity. At the end of the day, was it enough just to have touched the flag? After much discussion, we decided it wasn’t enough, and my editors had to perform one of the most painful parts of their job. They had to tell this man’s family, that while he was undoubtedly a worthy person, he was not, in our narrow construction of the term, a newsworthy person. Besides the monarchs and captains of industry, likely candidates for our page include another, lesser-known group. These are history’s backstage players who, working quietly, have nonetheless managed to reshape our culture — the men and women who have put enduring creases in the social fabric. And it is these unsung actors whom obit writers love best. In my decade in the job, I have had the great narrative pleasure of writing about Jack A. Kinzler, the NASA employee who designed a humble parasol that saved the imperiled Skylab space station; Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, who almost single-handedly opened the modeling profession to African-Americans; Ruth M. Siems, the General Foods home economist who invented Stove Top stuffing, and Leslie Buck, who designed the Anthora, the blue-and-white Greek-themed cardboard cup from which decades of New Yorkers drank their coffee. Each day, it is our job to come to know such strangers intimately, inhaling their lives through telephone calls to their families, through newspaper and magazine profiles culled from electronic databases and through the crumbling yellowed clippings from the Times morgue that can fall to dust in our fingers as we read them. The clock ticks down, the traffic hums on Eighth Avenue, the 24th cup of coffee is drunk and thus, at 6 o’clock, we all make deadline, day in and day out. If all has gone well, we have also arrived at the solution to the mystery, for in the course of the day we have learned not only how our subjects got from A to B to C in their lives — and how much of that progress was a product of free will and how much a result of pure blind fate — but also how, and why, they embodied the age in which they lived. That, in essence, is the deep, sometimes bittersweet pleasure of the job — the chance to see, through the lens of personal history, how the world, for better or worse, got to be the way it is. And that, too, is the very essence of obits, the journalistic genre that, more than any other, deals in the very stuff of life. Jack Kinzler, Whose Ingenuity Saved Skylab, Dies at 94

BY MARGALIT FOX March 14, 2014

Had Jack A. Kinzler not built model planes as a boy, had he not visited the post office as a youth and had he not, as a grown man, purchased four fishing rods at $12.95 apiece, Skylab — the United States’ $2.5 billion space station — would very likely have been forfeit. Providentially, Mr. Kinzler had done all those things, and Skylab, imperiled by the loss of a thermal shield on its launch in 1973, was saved. Mr. Kinzler saved it with a parasol. A constitutional tinkerer, Mr. Kinzler, who died on March 4 at 94, was for decades NASA’s resident Mr. Fix-It, building the impeccable full-scale models of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft used in a welter of preflight tests, and solving a spate of other mechanical problems over the years — all without the benefit of a college degree. Mr. Kinzler, the longtime chief of the Technical Services Center at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, also put six flags — and six plaques — on the moon and helped make possible the rarefied sport of lunar golf. “Whenever we run into trouble,” he told The Associated Press in 1973, “that’s when I really get interested.” Mr. Kinzler’s finest hour indisputably came after the launch of Skylab, designed as a scientific research station. En route to what would be a six-year mission, it went up unmanned on May 14, 1973; a three-man crew was due to follow the next day. But the loss of the heat shield proved a grave concern. Though Skylab was able to ascend to orbit, it would be uninhabitable without sufficient protection from the sun. Temperatures would be unbearable, onboard food and film stores would spoil and overheated plastic components could exude toxic gases. The crew’s departure was delayed until a solution could be found. Without one, NASA knew, Skylab would remain forever untenanted, a ghost ship in space. The proposed remedies, urgently solicited by NASA from its own engineers and from outside contractors, included ideas ranging from “spray paints, inflatable balloons and wallpapers to window curtains and extendable metal panels,” as the aerospace website AmericaSpace reported in a commemorative article last year. Mr. Kinzler bought fishing rods. Jack Albert Kinzler was born in Pittsburgh on Jan. 9, 1920. His father, a photoengraver and inventor whose formal schooling had ended with fourth grade, held patents on several photoengraving devices. An ardent model-plane builder, Jack flew his creations in national competitions. He was offered a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh but declined: College, he felt, would take time from aeronautical pursuits. He took a job as a bank clerk. One day when he was in his early 20s, he stopped into a local post office. There he saw a help-wanted poster seeking builders of model airplanes. The poster was from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the federal agency, founded in 1915, that was a precursor to NASA. With the war on in Europe and the threat of war preoccupying the United States, the committee was seeking recruits to build accurate models of military planes for testing in its mammoth wind tunnels. Mr. Kinzler joined the committee’s aeronautical laboratory in Langley, Va., becoming an apprentice model maker and toolmaker before being named the assistant superintendent of the machine shop there. In the late 1950s, when the committee was superseded by NASA, Mr. Kinzler moved with the new agency to Houston; he was its technical services chief from 1961 until his retirement in 1977. When Skylab shed its shield, most of the proposed solutions entailed a spacewalk, with all its inherent dangers. To Mr. Kinzler, that was an unattractive prospect: The commander of Skylab’s crew, Charles Conrad Jr., known as Pete, was his next-door neighbor and friend. What was needed, Mr. Kinzler knew, was a fix that could be done from the inside. He learned that Skylab had an airlock — a narrow passage meant for use as a camera port — near the site of the damage. It might be possible, he thought, to build a kind of flat, collapsible shade tree, which could be extruded through the airlock and, once outside, made to bloom. He phoned a sporting-goods store and ordered a set of fiberglass fishing rods. The salient thing about them was not that they caught fish, but that they telescoped. To build his prototype, Mr. Kinzler arranged four rods like the ribs of an immense umbrella, securing one to each side of a piece of parachute silk roughly 24 feet square. Folded, the parasol would just fit into the airlock. Once extruded, its canopy could be snapped open by means of springs. Normally, Mr. Kinzler said in interviews, the design, building and approval of such novel equipment might take NASA six months. His parasol was ready in six days — six days in which he and his staff of more than 100 lived, worked and slept in the Johnson Space Center. The finished parasol, built from telescoping aluminum tubes and silver-and-orange fabric of nylon, Mylar and aluminum, was stowed aboard the crew’s Apollo spacecraft. At 9 a.m. on May 25, the crew — Commander Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz — took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Just before midnight they docked with Skylab, where the interior temperature was approaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit; wearing spacesuits, they could work there for short periods. On May 26, after ensuring the station was free of hazardous gases, crew members pushed the parasol through the airlock and released the canopy. It did not open fully — it remained partly puckered — but in the end that did not matter. Over the next few days, Skylab’s inside temperature fell to a companionable 70 degrees. Shedding their suits, the astronauts completed their 28-day mission. For his work, Mr. Kinzler received the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA’s highest honor. By the time he saved Skylab, Mr. Kinzler was already an experienced unfurler. In the late 1960s, as the United States raced to put a man on the moon, NASA officials asked him to suggest what that man might do to mark the occasion once he got there. Plant a flag, Mr. Kinzler said, and leave a plaque. Mr. Kinzler was charged with designing a moonworthy flagstaff. He ordered a large American flag and, recalling how his mother used to hang curtains by sewing a hidden sleeve at the top and inserting a rod through it, did likewise. In his design, the sleeve was supported by a collapsible crossbar attached to the flagstaff. Just such a staff, neatly folded, was stowed aboard Apollo 11 when it set off for the moon on July 16, 1969. Planted on July 20, the flag, held by the crossbar, remained permanently snapped to attention in the moon’s airless atmosphere. (In a photograph taken before the crossbar was fully extended, the flag, hanging in folds, looks as though it is rippling in a breeze.) Each of the five succeeding crews to reach the moon planted one of Mr. Kinzler’s flagpoles. He also oversaw the design and manufacture of the commemorative plaques attached to all six lunar landing vehicles, left on the moon after each crew decamped. In a covert operation — a golfing holiday seemed out of keeping with NASA’s august mandate — Mr. Kinzler’s department helped fabricate the collapsible club, comprising a 6-iron head attached to the handle of a lunar-sample scoop, that Alan Shepard carried aboard Apollo 14 in 1971. Mr. Shepard hit two balls, shanking the first but connecting with the second. Mr. Kinzler’s survivors include his wife, the former Sylvia Richardson, whom he married in 1947; two sons, John and James; a daughter, Nancy Kinzler, who confirmed her father’s death, at his home in Taylor Lake Village, Tex., a Houston suburb; and seven grandchildren. Skylab, which over time was home to two additional crews, remained in orbit — Mr. Kinzler’s parasol still in place — until 1979, when, unmanned, it disintegrated on re- entering the atmosphere. On the moon, Mr. Kinzler’s flags still fly. His plaques endure. And, thanks partly to him, two small white spheres now grace the lunar surface, one of them hit some 200 yards in what will forever remain the most famous golf shot in the universe. Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, 91, Dies; Redefined Beauty

BY MARGALIT FOX March 13, 2014

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, who owned a charm school at 1627 Broadway, helped Barbara Barnes, a model and belly dancer, with makeup in 1969. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times)

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, a former model, agent, charm-school director and newspaper publisher who almost single-handedly opened the modeling profession to African- Americans, and in so doing expanded public understanding of what American beauty looks like, died on Feb. 28 in Manhattan. She was 91. Her death was announced on March 6 on the floor of the House of Representatives by Sanford D. Bishop Jr., Democrat of Georgia. At her death, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was the publisher emeritus of The Columbus Times, a black newspaper in Columbus, Ga., which she ran from the 1970s until her retirement about five years ago. Long before the phrase “Black is beautiful” gained currency in the 1960s, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was preaching that ethos by example. In New York in the 1940s — an age when modeling schools, and modeling jobs, were overwhelmingly closed to blacks — she helped start the Grace del Marco Modeling Agency and later founded the Ophelia DeVore School of Self-Development and Modeling. The enterprises, which served minorities, endured for six decades. The success of the agency, and the visibility of the school’s thousands of graduates, helped pave the way for the careers of contemporary black supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks. As an agent, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell represented members of the first wave of black models to attain wide visibility at midcentury, among them Helen Williams, often described as the first black supermodel. She also represented a young model named Richard Roundtree before he went on to fame as an actor in “Shaft” and other movies. As a charm-school director, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell taught dress, diction and deportment to thousands of students, including the future actress Diahann Carroll, the future television newswomen Sue Simmons and Melba Tolliver, and the future hip-hop artist Faith Evans. Besides tending to her pupils outwardly through classes like Wardrobe I, II and III; Social Graces; and Figure Control With Fencing and Ballet, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell designed a curriculum to bolster them inwardly, offering a counterweight to the tradition of internalized self-hatred that was many black Americans’ legacy. “Black has always been beautiful,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell once said. “But you had to hide it to be a model.” In the late 1930s, when Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell began her career as one of the first black models in the United States, she found work partly by hiding her own heritage. But in her case, the hiding was done entirely through inadvertence. Emma Ophelia DeVore was born on Aug. 12, 1922, in Edgefield, S.C., one of 10 children of John Walter DeVore, a building contractor, and the former Mary Emma Strother, a schoolteacher. As a girl, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell, whose family was of African, Cherokee, French and German descent, was educated in segregated Southern schools; she received additional instruction “in dancing, piano and all the other things in the arts that parents gave you to make you a lady,” as she told Ebony magazine in 2012. At 11, to further her education, she was sent to live with an aunt in New York. She graduated from Hunter College High School in Manhattan and went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with a minor in languages, including French, Latin and German, from New York University. A beauty with wide-set eyes, Ophelia DeVore had begun modeling casually as a teenager. A few years later, seeking professional training, she enrolled in the Vogue School of Modeling in New York. It was only toward the end of her studies there, when the school refused admission to another black candidate, that she realized it had mistaken her, with her light skin, for white. “I didn’t know that they didn’t know,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell said in the Ebony interview. “I thought they knew what I was.” Though a few modeling jobs came her way, especially once Ebony began publishing in 1945, she soon realized that the field remained largely closed to her — and utterly closed to darker-skinned models. In 1946, she and several friends founded the Grace del Marco agency. (The name was a coinage: “Grace” was a natural choice, “Marco” an acronym of the founders’ initials.) Two years later, wanting a training ground for black models, Mrs. DeVore- Mitchell established her charm school. One of the agency’s first great successes, starting in the 1950s, was Ms. Williams. Through a combination of Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell’s indefatigability, her considerable charm and Ms. Williams’s breathtaking luminosity, the agency placed her in campaigns for major advertisers — including Budweiser, Bulova and Johnson & Johnson — which appeared in mainstream publications like The New York Times Life and Redbook, feats without precedent for a black model. Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell’s most famous protégée, Ms. Carroll, who attended the charm school as a teenager, went on to stardom as a singer, a Broadway actress (she won a Tony Award in 1962 for her performance in the Richard Rodgers musical “No Strings”) and the title character in “Julia,” the NBC series about a young widowed nurse. Broadcast from 1968 to 1971, “Julia” is widely considered the first television series to star a black woman in a nonstereotyped role. Among her other accomplishments, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell wrote a fashion column for The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper; was a host of the ABC-TV program “Spotlight on Harlem” in the 1950s; was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts; and was featured in the 1989 book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America,” by Brian Lanker. She was a longtime resident of Manhattan. Her first marriage, to Harold Carter, a New York City firefighter, ended in divorce. In 1968 she married Vernon Mitchell, the publisher of The Columbus Times; on his death in 1972 she took over the paper, dividing her time between New York and Georgia. Her survivors include five children from her first marriage, Carol Gertjegerdes, James Carter, Marie Moore, Cheryl Parks and Michael Carter; nine grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren. Her charm school, which had several names and several locations in New York City over the years, closed its doors — then in the Empire State Building — in 2006, as did the agency. Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell’s own modeling career lasted just a few years. But her work advancing the careers of other models, she often said, was far more vital. “I wanted to change the way people of color were seen across the United States,” she told the black-themed news site The Grio last year. “I wanted America to know that beauty isn’t just white.” Maxine Powell, Motown’s Maven of Style, Dies at 98

BY MARGALIT FOX October 16, 2013

Maxine Powell, the Miss Manners of Motown, who as the director of the label’s in-house finishing school in the 1960s was considered in no small part responsible for its early success, died on Monday in Southfield, Mich. She was 98. Her death was announced by the Motown Museum in Detroit. In a statement on Monday, Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown Records, said that Mrs. Powell “brought something to Motown that no other record company had,” adding of his artists, “She was tough, but when she got through with them, they were poised, professional and very thankful.” At Motown, Mrs. Powell presided over what is believed to have been the only finishing school at an American record label at any time. Her disciples — young, scrappy and untried — included many future titans of American popular music, whom she polished with the finesse of a diamond cutter. “Mrs. Powell was always a lady of grace, elegance and style, and we did our best to emulate her,” Martha Reeves, the former lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think I would have been successful at all without her training.” Among her other pupils were the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. Diana Ross, the Supremes’ former lead singer, has described Mrs. Powell as “the person who taught me everything I know.” Officially, Mrs. Powell was a director of Motown’s artist development department. But in reality she was equal parts headmistress, psychotherapist, iron-willed favorite aunt and temperate bartender. Her combined ministrations, she told her charges, were meant to equip them for precisely two contingencies: invitations to the White House and invitations to Buckingham Palace. “I teach class,” Mrs. Powell was fond of saying. “And class will turn the heads of kings and queens.” Though Mrs. Powell was associated with the label for just five years, from 1964 to 1969, her presence was felt long beyond. “Every asset of my personality has been by her influence,” said Ms. Reeves, who became a lifelong friend. “Even to the end, she was making sure that I was standing with posture and exuberant grace.” At Motown, singers were required to take instruction from Mrs. Powell for two hours a day whenever they were in Detroit. Her curriculum covered deportment onstage and off: how to speak impeccably and stand erect, how to glide instead of merely walking, how to sit in a limousine with the ankles crossed just so. There was also individualized instruction. Ms. Ross, for instance, favored exorbitantly long false eyelashes. That did not sit well with Mrs. Powell, who installed shorter ones. Mr. Gaye liked to sing with his eyes closed. That did not sit well with Mrs. Powell either, and she insisted he keep them open. She once came upon the Supremes practicing a dance called the shake. That emphatically did not sit well with Mrs. Powell, as she recalled in a 1986 interview with People magazine: “ ‘You are protruding the buttocks,’ ” she admonished them. “ ‘Whenever you do a naughty step like the shake, add some class to it. Instead of shaking and acting tough, you should roll your buttocks under and keep smiling all the time.’ Then I showed them. They were shocked that I could do it and at how much better it looked my way.” Though Mrs. Powell was barely more than five feet tall, the world seemed scarcely large enough to contain her. By the time she arrived at Motown, she had been a stage actress, model and manicurist; a charm-school director; and the founder of what is widely described as Detroit’s first modeling agency for African-Americans. Maxine Blair was born on May 30, 1915, in Texarkana, Tex., and reared by an aunt in Chicago. She began acting as a teenager, eventually appearing with the Negro Drama League, a black repertory company there. She later worked as a model and trained as a manicurist and cosmetologist at Madam C. J. Walker’s School of Beauty Culture, founded by the celebrated black entrepreneur. After moving to Detroit in the 1940s, Mrs. Powell founded the Maxine Powell Finishing and Modeling School in 1951, which placed the first black models in campaigns for the city’s major automakers. One of Mrs. Powell’s models was Gwen Gordy, Berry’s sister. She told her brother that Mrs. Powell was just the person to groom his young stars. Mr. Gordy demurred at first, seeing no need. But his sister prevailed, and before long Mrs. Powell had closed her agency and moved to Motown, where she made herself indispensable. She often accompanied the artists on tour, serving as sounding board, chaperon and restrained mixologist. “After a performance, I made all the drinks,” Mrs. Powell told People. “Melvin Franklin of the Temptations said you had to have five of my drinks before you ever felt anything.” Mrs. Powell’s marriage to James Powell ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive. After leaving Motown, Mrs. Powell taught personal development for many years at Wayne County Community College in Detroit. She later worked part time as an aide to Ms. Reeves when she served on the Detroit City Council from 2005 to 2009. One of the most noteworthy things about Mrs. Powell’s tenure at Motown was her prescience. One day, she recalled in the interview with People, she taught her students how to sit on stools. The Supremes objected. “We don’t go to bars, why should we sit on a stool?” they said. “A lady with class can sit on a garbage pail and look good,” Mrs. Powell replied. Shortly afterward, the Supremes appeared on “The Mike Douglas Show,” and lo and behold, there were stools there. The Supremes sat, and by Mrs. Powell’s lights, they sat well. McCandlish Phillips, Who Exposed a Jewish Klansman, Is Dead at 85

BY MARGALIT FOX April 9, 2013

McCandlish Phillips in 1966. He left his journalism career in 1973 to spread the Gospel. (John Orris/The New York Times)

McCandlish Phillips, a former reporter for The New York Times who wrote one of the most famous articles in the newspaper’s history — exposing the Orthodox Jewish background of a senior Ku Klux Klan official — before forsaking journalism to spread the Gospel, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jaan Vaino, a friend. Even in a newsroom that employed Gay Talese, David Halberstam, Richard Reeves and Ada Louise Huxtable, Mr. Phillips, who was with The Times from 1952 to 1973, stood out. He stood out as a tenacious reporter and a lyrical stylist — an all-too-rare marriage in newspapers then — and in his hands even a routine news article seldom failed to delight. Consider Mr. Phillips’s 1961 account of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an annual millstone for the city’s general-assignment reporters: “The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.” In his 2003 memoir, “City Room,” Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The Times, called Mr. Phillips “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.” Mr. Phillips stood out in other ways. About 6 feet 5 inches tall and not much more than 160 pounds, he was often described as a latter-day Ichabod Crane — “the man of the awkward gait and the graceful phrase,” his editors called him. An evangelical Christian, he kept a Bible on his desk and led prayer meetings for like-minded colleagues (there were none when he joined the paper, he noted ruefully) in a conference room off the newsroom. He refrained from smoking, drinking, cursing and gambling, each of which had been refined to a high, exuberant art in the Times newsroom — the last of these to such a degree that at midcentury the newspaper employed two bookmakers-in-residence, nominally on the payroll as news clerks. Mr. Phillips’s most renowned article appeared on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It was a rigorously reported profile of Daniel Burros, a 28-year-old Queens man who was the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party. Mr. Burros, the article went on to document, was also a Jew — a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13. The article remains a case study in a reporter’s perseverance in the face of intimidation. It is also a case study in the severe, unintended consequences that the airing of fiercely guarded truths can have for the guardian: despite threatening to kill Mr. Phillips if the article went to press, Mr. Burros, in the end, killed only himself. John McCandlish Phillips Jr. was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., on Long Island, on Dec. 4, 1927. His father was a traveling salesman, and young Johnny, as he was known, would attend 13 grammar schools across New York, Ohio and Massachusetts. After graduating from Brookline High School, near Boston, he forwent college for reporting and editing jobs on small New England papers. From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Phillips served with the Army at Fort Holabird, in Baltimore, and it was there, he said, that he attended the church service at which he was born again. Mr. Phillips joined The Times as a copy boy in November 1952, later working as a clerk on the city desk and in the Washington bureau. In 1955, he was made a cub reporter and consigned to prove his mettle in the paper’s Brooklyn office, then a dank, decrepit outfit near Police Department headquarters in the borough’s nether regions. His account of life there, written for Times Talk, the newspaper’s house organ (“It is impossible to tell a plainclothes detective from a mugger here. You just have to wait to see what they do”), so delighted the newspaper’s management that his sentence was commuted to service in the main newsroom. In October 1965, The Times received a tip about Mr. Burros’s Jewish upbringing. Assigned to pursue it, Mr. Phillips, aided by newsroom colleagues, spent days reconstructing his life, scouring school, military, employment and police records; amassing photographs; and interviewing neighbors and associates. The one thing they lacked was an interview with Mr. Burros: efforts to reach him had been unsuccessful. Finally, on a return visit to South Ozone Park, the Queens neighborhood in which Mr. Burros lived, Mr. Phillips glimpsed him on the street — “a round, short, sallow young man who looked a little like a small heap of misery,” he would later write in Times Talk. He approached Mr. Burros, and they went into a luncheonette. The conversation, which ranged over Mr. Burros’s brilliant scholastic record — he had an I.Q. of 154 — and his rise to power in the Klan, was cordial. Then, nearly 20 minutes into the interview, Mr. Phillips raised the subject of Mr. Burros’s Jewishness. “If you publish that, I’ll come and get you and I’ll kill you,” Mr. Burros said. “I don’t care what happens to me. I’ll be ruined. This is all I’ve got to live for.” By the time the two men parted, Mr. Phillips later wrote, Mr. Burros had threatened his life half a dozen times. Mr. Phillips returned to the newsroom, and The Times arranged for round-the-clock bodyguards. He wrote his article, detailing Mr. Burros’s religious upbringing, his early fascination with far-right ideologies and his advocacy of genocide for Jews and blacks. On the day the article was published, Mr. Burros committed suicide. The article cemented Mr. Phillips’s reputation as one of the city’s most esteemed reporters. He spent his remaining years at The Times primarily in the paper’s Metropolitan section, where his portfolio included the About New York column. Mr. Phillips became known in particular for his coverage of the city’s vaunted, vanishing institutions, as in this 1969 article about the closing of the original Lindy’s delicatessen, which began: “What kind of a day is today? It’s the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy’s, you couldn’t get it.” Near the end of the article, he wrote, with plain-spoken, impeccable logic: “The locusts stripped the place of menus and ashtrays and other mementos. There were conflicting claimants to possession of the last bagel. As a souvenir, a bagel is not much good. It is perishable and it also lacks proof. Anyone can hold up a bagel and say, ‘This is the last bagel from Lindy’s.’ ” Mr. Phillips resigned from The Times in late 1973 for a life in religion. In 1962, he had helped found the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a Pentecostal congregation in Manhattan. Its tenets, as Ken Auletta wrote in a 1997 New Yorker profile of Mr. Phillips, include the belief that “pornography, drugs, abortion and any form of fornication (including premarital sex and homosexuality) are sins.” In the early 1970s, the New Testament Missionary Fellowship made headlines after the kidnapping or attempted kidnapping of several of its congregants by their families. The families maintained that the group had trained the congregants to repudiate them. After leaving The Times, Mr. Phillips lived, in Mr. Auletta’s account, a contented if threadbare existence, preaching the Gospel on the Columbia University campus, near his home, and managing the fellowship’s affairs. The fellowship, which has long since ceased to incur unfavorable notice, is still extant, based in Upper Manhattan. Mr. Phillips, who never married, is survived by a sister, Janet DeClemente. He published several books, including “City Notebook” (1974), a collection of his articles from The Times, and “What Every Christian Should Know About the Supernatural” (1988). Over the years, Mr. Phillips was asked whether he felt responsible for Mr. Burros’s suicide. He felt “a vague sense of sadness,” he said, but no guilt. His stance — the view from the prospect where his faith and his journalism converged — was encapsulated in a remark he made to Mr. Gelb. On the afternoon of Oct. 31, 1965, Mr. Gelb phoned Mr. Phillips to tell him, very gently, that Mr. Burros had shot himself. “What I think we’ve seen here, Arthur,” Mr. Phillips replied, “is the God of Israel acting in judgment.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. Rabbi Herschel Schacter Is Dead at 95; Cried to the Jews of Buchenwald: ‘You Are Free’

BY MARGALIT FOX March 26, 2013

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, 80, presided over the Mosholu Jewish Center, once a major synagogue in the Bronx, for 52 years. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)

The smoke was still rising as Rabbi Herschel Schacter rode through the gates of Buchenwald. It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour before. Rabbi Schacter, who was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps, was the first Jewish chaplain to enter in its wake. That morning, after learning that Patton’s forward tanks had arrived at the camp, Rabbi Schacter, who died in the Riverdale section of the Bronx on Thursday at 95 after a career as one of the most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States, commandeered a jeep and driver. He left headquarters and sped toward Buchenwald. By late afternoon, when the rabbi drove through the gates, Allied tanks had breached the camp. He remembered, he later said, the sting of smoke in his eyes, the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of bodies strewn everywhere. He would remain at Buchenwald for months, tending to survivors, leading religious services in a former Nazi recreation hall and eventually helping to resettle thousands of Jews. For his work, Rabbi Schacter was singled out by name on Friday by Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, in a meeting with President Obama at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. In Buchenwald that April day, Rabbi Schacter said afterward, it seemed as though there was no one left alive. In the camp, he encountered a young American lieutenant who knew his way around. “Are there any Jews alive here?” the rabbi asked him. He was led to the Kleine Lager, or Little Camp, a smaller camp within the larger one. There, in filthy barracks, men lay on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. They stared down at the rabbi, in his unfamiliar military uniform, with unmistakable fright. “Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,” Rabbi Schacter cried in Yiddish, “ihr zint frei!” — “Peace be upon you, Jews, you are free!” He ran from barracks to barracks, repeating those words. He was joined by those Jews who could walk, until a stream of people swelled behind him. As he passed a mound of corpses, Rabbi Schacter spied a flicker of movement. Drawing closer, he saw a small boy, Prisoner 17030, hiding in terror behind the mound. “I was afraid of him,” the child would recall long afterward in an interview with The New York Times. “I knew all the uniforms of SS and Gestapo and Wehrmacht, and all of a sudden, a new kind of uniform. I thought, ‘A new kind of enemy.’ ” With tears streaming down his face, Rabbi Schacter picked the boy up. “What’s your name, my child?” he asked in Yiddish. “Lulek,” the child replied. “How old are you?” the rabbi asked. “What difference does it make?” Lulek, who was 7, said. “I’m older than you, anyway.” “Why do you think you’re older?” Rabbi Schacter asked, smiling. “Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?” Rabbi Schacter discovered nearly a thousand orphaned children in Buchenwald. He and a colleague, Rabbi Robert Marcus, helped arrange for their transport to France — a convoy that included Lulek and the teenage Elie Wiesel — as well as to Switzerland, a group personally conveyed by Rabbi Schacter, and to Palestine. For decades afterward, Rabbi Schacter said, he remained haunted by his time in Buchenwald, and by the question survivors put to him as he raced through the camp that first day. “They were asking me, over and over, ‘Does the world know what happened to us?’ ” Rabbi Schacter told The Associated Press in 1981. “And I was thinking, ‘If my own father had not caught the boat on time, I would have been there, too.’ ” Herschel Schacter was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on Oct. 10, 1917, the youngest of 10 children of parents who had come from Poland. His father, Pincus, was a seventh-generation shochet, or ritual slaughterer; his mother, the former Miriam Schimmelman, was a real estate manager. Mr. Schacter earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in New York in 1938; in 1941, he received ordination at Yeshiva from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a founder of the Modern Orthodox movement. He spent about a year as a pulpit rabbi in Stamford, Conn., before enlisting in the Army as a chaplain in 1942. After Buchenwald was liberated, he spent every day there distributing matzo (liberation had come just a week after Passover); leading services for Shavuot, which celebrates the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai, and which fell that year in May; and conducting Friday night services. At one of those services, Lulek and his older brother, Naftali, were able to say Kaddish for their parents, Polish Jews who had been killed by the Nazis. Discharged from the Army with the rank of captain, Rabbi Schacter became the spiritual leader of the Mosholu Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue on Hull Avenue in the north Bronx. He presided there from 1947 until it closed in 1999. He was a leader of many national Jewish groups, including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, of which he was a past chairman. He was most recently the director of rabbinic services at Yeshiva. Rabbi Schacter, who in 1956 went to the Soviet Union with an American rabbinic delegation, was an outspoken advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews and an adviser on the subject to President Richard M. Nixon. A resident of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Rabbi Schacter is survived by his wife, the former Pnina Gewirtz, whom he married in 1948; a son, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, who confirmed his father’s death; a daughter, Miriam Schacter; four grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. And what of Lulek, the orphan Rabbi Schacter rescued from Buchenwald that day? Lulek, who eventually settled in Palestine, grew up to be Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau, who recounted his childhood exchange with Rabbi Schacter in a memoir, published in English in 2011 as “Out of the Depths,” was the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003 and is now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. On Friday, when Rabbi Lau told Mr. Obama of his rescue by Rabbi Schacter — he thanked the American people for delivering Buchenwald survivors “not from slavery to freedom, but from death to life” — he had not yet learned of Rabbi Schacter’s death the day before. “For me, he was alive,” Rabbi Lau said in an interview with The Times on Monday. “I speak about him with tears in my eyes.” John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All- Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

BY MARGALIT FOX February 8, 2013

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use. (Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA)

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them? And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc? For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin. By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public. But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects. It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans. “He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1- 2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin. The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment. Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry. A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics. “Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.” Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial. John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet. Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties. In 1945 he joined Bell Labs, then the jointly owned research and development arm of the American Telephone & Telegraph and Western Electric Companies. (It is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent.) The first research psychologist on the labs’ staff, Mr. Karlin spent his early years there working on problems in telephone acoustics. Before long, he later said, he realized that the dynamics of using a telephone involved far more than speaking and hearing. In 1947 he persuaded Bell Labs to create a unit, originally called the User Preference department and later Human Factors Engineering, to study these larger questions; Mr. Karlin became its head in 1951. An early experiment involved the telephone cord. In the postwar years, the copper used inside the cords remained scarce. Telephone company executives wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be shortened. Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot. From then on, phones came with shorter cords. Mr. Karlin also introduced the white dot inside each finger hole that was a fixture of rotary phones in later years. After the phone was redesigned at midcentury, with the letters and numbers moved outside the finger holes, users, to AT&T’s bewilderment, could no longer dial as quickly. With blank space at the center of the holes, Mr. Karlin found, callers no longer had a target at which to aim their fingers. The dot restored the speed. Mr. Karlin’s biggest challenge was almost certainly the advent of the push-button phone, officially introduced on Nov. 18, 1963, in two Pennsylvania communities, Carnegie and Greensburg. In 1946, a Bell Labs engineer, Rudolph F. Mallina, had patented an early model, with buttons arranged in two horizontal rows: 1 through 5 on top, 6 through 0 below. It was never marketed. By the late 1950s, when touch-tone dialing — much faster than rotary — seemed an inevitability, Mr. Karlin’s group began to study what form the phone of the future should take. Keypad configurations examined included Mr. Mallina’s, one with buttons in a circle, another with buttons in an arc, and a rectangular pad. The victorious design, based on the group’s studies of speed, accuracy and users’ own preferences, used keys half an inch square. The keypad itself was rectangular, comprising 10 keys: a 3-by-3 grid spanning 1 through 9, plus zero, centered below. Today’s omnipresent 12-button keypad, with star and pound keys flanking the zero, grew directly from this model. Putting “1-2-3” on the pad’s top row instead of the bottom (the configuration used, then as now, on adding machines and calculators) was also born of Mr. Karlin’s group: they found it made for more accurate dialing. Mr. Karlin’s first marriage, to Jane Daggett, ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the former Susan Leigh, whom he married in 1963; a daughter from his first marriage, Bonnie Farber; three stepchildren, Christopher, Stuart and Susan Leigh, who confirmed her stepfather’s death, at his home in Little Silver, N.J.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A son from Mr. Karlin’s first marriage, Christopher Karlin, died in 1968. Throughout his career, Mr. Karlin was happy to work out of the limelight, a stance doubtless reinforced by this cautionary tale of all-digit dialing: By the postwar period, telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers, but whether users could memorize the seven digits it entailed was an open question. Mr. Karlin’s experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield — the stuff of song and story — began to slip away. By the 1960s, those exchanges, along with DRexel, FLeetwood, SWinburne and scores of others just as evocative, had all but disappeared. This did not please traditionalists, and thanks to the papers they knew the culprit’s name. “One day I was at a cocktail party and I saw some people over in the corner,” Mr. Karlin recalled in a 2003 lecture. “They were obviously looking at me and talking about me. Finally a lady from this group came over and said, ‘Are you the John Karlin who is responsible for all-number dialing?’ ” Mr. Karlin drew himself up with quiet pride. “Yes, I am,” he replied. “How does it feel,” his inquisitor asked, “to be the most hated man in America?” Gray Foy, Artist and Avatar of a Gilded Age, Dies at 90

BY MARGALIT FOX December 1, 2012

They all came in a body: the threadbare actors and decadent aristocrats, the Black Forest woodcarvers and prima ballerinas, the pantalooned fops and gin-soaked playwrights, the lepidopterists and sundry maiden aunts — everyone whose history suffused any of the thousands of antiques in Gray Foy’s Manhattan home. In Mr. Foy’s vision, which came to him 15 years ago as he slept — it seems far too vital to be called a dream — the line began at his apartment door, extended down five flights of stairs to the lobby, threaded out the entrance to his building, at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, and stretched along 57th as far as the eye could see, a strand of patient, ghostly, often anonymous visitors that snaked down the centuries. An artist of considerable early reputation, Mr. Foy, who was known in later years as a tastemaker, bon vivant, salonnier, partygoer, party-giver, genteel accumulator and perennial fixture of New York cultural life, died on Nov. 23, at 90, in the 3,500-square- foot, largely lilac-walled apartment in the Osborne, at 205 West 57th Street, where he had lived since the 1960s in congenial Victorian profusion. His death was confirmed by his spouse, Joel Kaye. For decades, Mr. Foy was a quiet if supremely capable avatar of the city’s gracious, aesthetically minded, boldface-named social milieu, a latter-day Gilded Age that flourished in New York in the years before the Stonewall uprising and for some time after, of which Truman Capote was perhaps the best-known embodiment. With Leo Lerman, his companion of nearly half a century, Mr. Foy passed the years in a welter of dinner parties, holiday fetes, black-tie galas and opening nights. This heady whirl is recounted in “The Grand Surprise” (2007; edited by Stephen Pascal), the posthumous journals of Mr. Lerman, a writer and editor for Condé Nast publications who died in 1994. On any given night — first in the crumbling brownstone on upper Lexington Avenue where their romance began in the late 1940s, and later in the apartment in the Osborne, to which the couple moved in 1967 — the Foy-Lerman firmament might include many of these stars: Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Maria Callas, Mr. Capote, Carol Channing, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Aaron Copland, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, John Gielgud, Martha Graham, Cary Grant, Anaïs Nin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith Sitwell, Susan Sontag, Virgil Thomson, Lionel and Diana Trilling and Anna May Wong. Mr. Foy continued entertaining to the end of his life, giving parties for as many as 100 guests. With his death, an era passes. “He was the last of a breed,” said Mr. Kaye, a longtime friend who married Mr. Foy in Manhattan last year and is his only immediate survivor. “A breed of person who was educated and interested in everything that was artistic. He knew every piece of classical music, he knew the words to every song until 1965, he knew architecture, he knew cooking, and he knew the art of conversation.” He also knew how to draw. As a young man, Mr. Foy was renowned for two things: his ethereal beauty and his artistic promise. He drew as he lived, in minute, meticulously constructed abundance, and his work resembles that of no other artist. A typical pencil drawing by Mr. Foy, on which he might spend as much as a year, teems with massed forms that seem to rear up out of a shared shadowy past: human limbs and torsos, webs of twisted organic shapes that recall tree roots and leaves. The resulting image, built up of hundreds of thousands of tiny black marks, suggests “Guernica” done by M. C. Escher. A 1942 drawing by Mr. Foy, “Dimensions,” has been donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York by one of his friends, the actor Steve Martin. What he was trying to do in his work, Mr. Foy has said in interviews, was catch and hold memory on paper. And though his artistic career ultimately yielded to the demands of domesticity, it was clear that his domestic life, too, with the vast assemblages and tender care of people and things it entailed, was equally about the custodianship of memory. Mr. Foy shoehorned the people companionably around the things, for one did not so much walk through his apartment as edge crabwise through its scant open spaces. On Wednesday, Mr. Kaye guided a visitor gingerly around the place, which resembles the properties room of “Upstairs, Downstairs” crossed with Aladdin’s cave. Among the items he pointed out — a few of them auction-house rarities but many others, just as impeccable, thrift-shop bargains — were these: A wall massed with old engravings of fireworks displays; a forest of silver candlesticks; a wall of Japanese prints; shelves of birds’ eggs of stone, glass and the like; Russian boxes; a row of cups carved from horn; a collection of purple-and-white slag glass; a bell jar, nearly a yard high, housing an assemblage of carved wax fruit; another bell jar, almost as tall, enclosing a bouquet of woolen flowers; a shelf of smaller bell jars, each holding a miniature waxwork; masses of Majolica; a bevy of carved bears; Tiffany lamps; and Victorian settees awash in embroidered cushions. That was just the sitting room. Seven other rooms followed, plus the foyer, the bathroom and a hallway or two. All were similarly appointed, containing, among other things, butterflies (pressed), a large snowy owl (stuffed), a ceramic hip flask shaped like a pretzel (salted). Many years ago, visiting the apartment with his mother, a very young John F. Kennedy Jr. was seen picking up object after object and turning each one gingerly over. He thought he was in a shop, the adults realized, and was looking for price tags. Frederick Gray Foy Jr. was born in Dallas on Aug. 10, 1922; after his parents separated when he was about 4, he moved with his mother to Los Angeles. During World War II, Mr. Foy worked in a Lockheed aircraft plant in California. He later attended Southern Methodist University before moving to New York, where he studied art at Columbia. He found critical success while he was still a student. In an article about Mr. Foy’s work in 1948, The New York Herald Tribune described him as “a superb craftsman, a young person who will someday be reckoned with in the field of modern art.” That year, Mr. Foy met Mr. Lerman at a party at Mr. Lerman’s home. (On arriving, Mr. Foy had an augury of their luminous future together: When he knocked on the door, it was answered by Marlene Dietrich.) Though Mr. Foy had several well-reviewed gallery shows, created book jackets and classical-album covers and won a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship for his drawing, his role as helpmeet to the far more gregarious Mr. Lerman — it was Mr. Foy who shopped, cooked and otherwise arranged their days — gradually eclipsed his art. It was a role he accepted, Mr. Kaye said, for the love of Mr. Lerman and out of immense affection for their friends. Mr. Foy’s apartment is too costly to maintain alone, Mr. Kaye said on Wednesday. It will soon be put on the market, and its carefully husbanded hoard — thousands of objects, if not tens of thousands — will be dismantled and sold at auction. With that, Mr. Foy’s treasures will pass to a spate of new owners, as yet unknown, and become imbued with their histories. In time, they will pass to other, younger hands, and to still others after that. And with each exchange, the ghostly queue down 57th Street will grow a little longer — its denizens nominally invisible, yet in Gotham’s cumulative imagination, vibrantly discernible. Irving Cohen, King Cupid of the Catskills, Dies at 95

BY MARGALIT FOX October 3, 2012

Irving Cohen in 1991, with a pegboard to keep track of who sat where in the Concord dining room. The pegs’ colors told a tale. (David Jennings /The New York Times)

Irving Cohen, who was known as King Cupid of the Catskills for his canny ability to seat just the right nice Jewish boy next to just the right nice Jewish girl during his half-century as the maître d’ of the Concord Hotel, died on Monday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 95. His son Bob confirmed the death. By all accounts the borscht belt’s longest-serving maître d’hôtel, Mr. Cohen worked at the Concord, in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y., from his early 20s until he was in his early 80s. He would have worked there longer, he said, had the hotel not closed in 1998. Officially, Mr. Cohen presided over three meals a day in the vast kosher empire that was the Concord dining room, helping thousands of patrons navigate its towering shoals of gefilte fish, pot roast, potato pudding and a great deal else. Unofficially (though only just), he was the matchmaker for a horde of hopefuls, who flocked to the Catskills ostensibly for shuffleboard and Sammy Davis Jr. but in actuality to eat, drink, marry and be fruitful and multiply, generally in that order. Thanks to Mr. Cohen, many did. In the 1940s, he paired the Concord’s original clientele. In the ’60s, he paired their children. And in the ’80s, he paired their children’s children. It is no exaggeration, Bob Cohen said Tuesday, to say that thousands of marriages resulted from his father’s sharp-eyed ministrations. And thus, simply by doing his job — which combined Holmesian deductive skill with Postian etiquette and a touch of cryptographic cloak and dagger — Mr. Cohen single-handedly helped perpetuate a branch of American Jewry. Irving Jay Cohen was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 11, 1917. After graduating from Seward Park High School, he found work as a busboy at Grossinger’s, another well-known Catskills resort. He eventually became a waiter there, serving the likes of John Garfield (né Jacob Julius Garfinkle), Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor and Irving Berlin. Mr. Cohen joined the Concord as a waiter in the late 1930s. In 1943, he became the maître d’, commanding a dining room that seated more than 3,000. Before long, he was taking phone calls from a multitude of mothers, who beseeched him to seat their eligible daughters beside eligible young men. Corresponding calls from mothers of sons were rarer, Mr. Cohen said, though not unknown. For making matches, Mr. Cohen relied on his keen ability to suss out subjects at a glance. Age, sex and marital status were of crucial concern, of course, but so too were occupation, tax bracket and geography. “You got to pair them by states and even from the same cities,” Mr. Cohen told The Daily News in 1967. “If they come from different places, the doll is always afraid the guy will forget her as soon as he gets home.” To keep track of demographic information, Mr. Cohen used a specially built pegboard, 10 feet long, on which each of the Concord’s hundreds of dining tables was represented by a circle. Around each circle was a set of holes, and as Mr. Cohen seated each diner, he stuck the appropriate hole with a color-coded peg — pink for single young women, blue for single young men, white for older people and several other colors denoting characteristics so secret they appear to have been known only to him. Though Mr. Cohen plied his trade well into the computer age, the pegboard endured. “Can a computer get to the human element?” he said in the Daily News interview. “I ask you, can a nice widow, maybe a little on the plump side, but nice, can she tell all her aches and dreams to a computer? Never!” Mr. Cohen’s first wife, the former Sarah Berzon, whom he married in 1944, died in 1982. He is survived by his second wife, Christine Golia; three children from his first marriage, Bob, Arnie and Barbara Cohen Parness; two stepsons, Ed and Christopher Ventrice; and grandchildren, step-grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mr. Cohen’s dining-room savvy extended far beyond matters of the heart. As he recounted in the 1991 book “It Happened in the Catskills,” by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, he was accosted one night by a guest, purple with rage. “My wife almost choked,” the man told him. “I’m going to sue the hotel for a million dollars.” The offending object was a small metal tag, called a plumba, affixed to meat to identify it as kosher. The tags were normally removed before cooking, but this one, on a chicken, had been overlooked. “What’s your name?,” Mr. Cohen asked the woman hurriedly. “Your address?” He raced to the dining-room microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Mr. and Mrs. Sam Weinstein from Cedarhurst, Long Island, have just won a bottle of Champagne. Mrs. Weinstein is the lucky lady who wound up with the chicken with the plumba.” Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

BY MARGALIT FOX May 8, 2012

Maurice Sendak, at his Ridgefield, Conn., home with his German shepherd, Herman, in 2006. (Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times)

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83. The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived nearby in Ridgefield, Conn. Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963. Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.” In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy” — the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best- seller list, tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party. A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack — is scheduled to be published next February. Mr. Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a designer of theatrical sets. His art graced the writing of other eminent authors for children and adults, including Hans Christian Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Headstrong and Bossy Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home. A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives. His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th- century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said. In 1964, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Sendak the Caldecott Medal, considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, for “Where the Wild Things Are.” In simple, incantatory language, the book told the story of Max, a naughty boy who rages at his mother and is sent to his room without supper. A pocket Odysseus, Max promptly sets sail: And he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are. There, Max leads the creatures in a frenzied rumpus before sailing home, anger spent, to find his supper waiting. As portrayed by Mr. Sendak, the wild things are deliciously grotesque: huge, snaggletoothed, exquisitely hirsute and glowering maniacally. He always maintained he was drawing his relatives — who, in his memory at least, had hovered like a pack of middle-aged gargoyles above the childhood sickbed to which he was often confined. Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his father, Philip, worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Family photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice Sendak illustration. Mr. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their fleshy petulance. A frail child beset by a seemingly endless parade of illnesses, Mr. Sendak was reared, he said afterward, in a world of looming terrors: the Depression; World War II; the Holocaust, in which many of his European relatives perished; the seemingly infinite vulnerability of children to danger. He experienced the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932 as a personal torment: if that fair-haired, blue-eyed princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst? An image from the Lindbergh crime scene — a ladder leaning against the side of a house — would find its way into “Outside Over There,” in which a baby is carried off by goblins. As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.” His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless children in the age of AIDS. It showed in his habits. He could be dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the Connecticut countryside with only Mozart, Melville, Mickey Mouse and his dogs for company. It showed in his everyday interactions with people, especially those blind to the seriousness of his enterprise. “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ ” Mr. Sendak told Vanity Fair last year.“I wanted to kill her.” But Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite gregarious. He was a man of many enthusiasms — for music, art, literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them. He was also a mentor to a generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky, went on to prominent careers of their own.

Long Hours in Bed As far back as he could remember, Mr. Sendak had loved to draw. That and looking out the window had helped him pass the long hours in bed. While he was still in high school — at Lafayette in Brooklyn — he worked part time for All-American Comics, filling in backgrounds for book versions of the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip. His first professional illustrations were for a physics textbook, “Atomics for the Millions,” published in 1947. In 1948, at 20, he took a job building window displays for F. A. O. Schwarz. Through the store’s children’s book buyer, he was introduced to Ursula Nordstrom, the distinguished editor of children’s books at Harper & Row. The meeting, the start of a long, fruitful collaboration, led to Mr. Sendak’s first children’s book commission: illustrating “The Wonderful Farm,” by Marcel Aymé, published in 1951. Under Ms. Nordstrom’s guidance, Mr. Sendak went on to illustrate books by other well-known children’s authors, including several by Ruth Krauss, notably “A Hole Is to Dig” (1952), and Else Holmelund Minarik’s “Little Bear” series. The first title he wrote and illustrated himself, “Kenny’s Window,” published in 1956, was a moody, dreamlike story about a lonely boy’s inner life. Mr. Sendak’s books were often a window on his own experience. “Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life” was a valentine to Jennie, his beloved Sealyham terrier, who died shortly before the book was published. At the start of the story, Jennie, who has everything a dog could want — including “a round pillow upstairs and a square pillow downstairs” — packs her bags and sets off on her own, pining for adventure. She finds it on the stage of the World Mother Goose Theatre, where she becomes a leading lady. Every day, and twice on Saturdays, Jennie, who looks rather like a mop herself, eats a mop made out of salami. This makes her very happy. “Hello,” Jennie writes in a satisfyingly articulate letter to her master. “As you probably noticed, I went away forever. I am very experienced now and very famous. I am even a star. … I get plenty to drink too, so don’t worry.” By contrast, the huge, flat, brightly colored illustrations of “In the Night Kitchen,” the story of a boy’s journey through a fantastic nocturnal cityscape, are a tribute to the New York of Mr. Sendak’s childhood, recalling the 1930s films and comic books he adored all his life. (The three bakers who toil in the night kitchen are the spit and image of Oliver Hardy.) Mr. Sendak’s later books could be much darker. “Brundibar” (2003), with text by the playwright Tony Kushner, is a picture book based on an opera performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The opera, also called “Brundibar,” had been composed in 1938 by Hans Krasa, a Czech Jew who later died in Auschwitz.

‘Melodramatic Menace’ Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and children’s book author Gregory Maguire called it “a capering picture book crammed with melodramatic menace and comedy both low and grand.” He added: “In a career that spans 50 years and counting, as Sendak’s does, there are bound to be lesser works. ‘Brundibar’ is not lesser than anything.” With Mr. Kushner, Mr. Sendak collaborated on a stage version of the opera, performed in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York. Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak’s work was not always well received. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed puzzlement and outright unease. Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Mr. Sendak to task for punishing Max: “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” Mr. Bettelheim wrote. “To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion.” (Mr. Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the book.) “In the Night Kitchen,” which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a diaper over Mickey’s nether region. But these were minority responses. Mr. Sendak’s other awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton. Twenty-two of his titles have been named New York Times best illustrated books of the year. Many of Mr. Sendak’s books had second lives on stage and screen. Among the most notable adaptations are the operas “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” by the British composer Oliver Knussen, and Carole King’s “Really Rosie,” a musical version of “The Sign on Rosie’s Door,” which appeared on television as an animated special in 1975 and on the Off Broadway stage in 1980. In 2009, a feature film version of “Where the Wild Things Are” — part live action, part animated — by the director Spike Jonze opened to favorable notices. (With Lance Bangs, Mr. Jonze also directed “Tell Them Anything You Want,” a documentary film about Mr. Sendak first broadcast on HBO that year.) In the 1970s, Mr. Sendak began designing sets and costumes for adaptations of his own work and, eventually, the work of others. His first venture was Mr. Knussen’s “Wild Things,” for which Mr. Sendak also wrote the libretto. Performed in a scaled-down version in Brussels in 1980, the opera had its full premiere four years later, to great acclaim, staged in London by the Glyndebourne Touring Opera. With the theater director Frank Corsaro, he also created sets for several venerable operas, among them Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” performed by the Houston Grand Opera in 1980, and Leos Janacek’s “Cunning Little Vixen” for the New York City Opera in 1981. For the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Mr. Sendak designed sets and costumes for a 1983 production of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”; a film version was released in 1986. Among Mr. Sendak’s recent books is his only pop-up book, “Mommy?,” published by Scholastic in 2006, with a scenario by Mr. Yorinks and paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart. Mr. Sendak’s companion of a half-century, Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of young people, died in 2007. Mr. Sendak’s personal assistant, Lynn Caponera, worked for him almost as long while living at his Ridgefield home. No immediate family members survive. Though he understood children deeply, Mr. Sendak by no means valorized them unconditionally. “Dear Mr. Sun Deck …” he could drone with affected boredom, imitating the semiliterate forced-march school letter- writing projects of which he was the frequent, if dubious, beneficiary. But he cherished the letters that individual children sent him unbidden, which burst with the sparks that his work had ignited. “Dear Mr. Sendak,” read one, from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.” John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74

BY MARGALIT FOX February 18, 2012

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there. He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible. In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean. In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.) Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s. Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London. For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in. At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler. Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure- based reality television. The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC. Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will. On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over. His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone. At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected. He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him. In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills. When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train. He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do. On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered. Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers. The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus. On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again. This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific. “He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?” Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster. “It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.” Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost. For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.” Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.” Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea. In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond. Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate. Camilla Williams, Barrier-Breaking Opera Star, Dies at 92

BY MARGALIT FOX February 2, 2012

On May 15, 1946, an unknown singer named Camilla Williams took the stage at City Center in Manhattan as Cio-Cio-San, the doomed heroine of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Her performance would be the capstone of a night of glorious firsts. Miss Williams, a lyric soprano who began her career as a concert singer, had never been in an opera. The New York City Opera, the young upstart company with which she was making her debut, had never before staged “Madama Butterfly.” But there was another, far more important first, though its significance has been largely forgotten over time: As Cio-Cio-San, Miss Williams, the daughter of a chauffeur and a domestic in the Jim Crow South, was the first black woman to secure a contract with a major United States opera company — a distinction widely ascribed in the public memory to the contralto Marian Anderson. Miss Williams’s performance that night, to rave reviews, came nearly a decade before Miss Anderson first sang at the Metropolitan Opera. As Miss Williams, who died on Sunday at 92, well knew, it was a beacon that lighted the way to American opera houses for other black women, Miss Anderson included. That Miss Williams’s historic role is scarcely remembered today is rooted in both the rarefied world of opera-house politics and the ubiquitous racial anxiety of midcentury America. And though she was far too well mannered to trumpet her rightful place in history, her relegation to its margins caused her great private anguish. “The lack of recognition for my accomplishments used to bother me, but you cannot cry over those things,” Miss Williams said in a 1995 interview with the opera scholar Elizabeth Nash. “There is no place for bitterness in singing. It works on the cords and ruins the voice. In his own good time, God brings everything right.” Miss Williams’s hiring by City Opera was of a piece with the tentative first stabs by postwar America at integrating the worlds of culture and entertainment. In 1945, the year before she first sang there, the baritone Todd Duncan, who in 1935 had created the part of Porgy in the original Broadway production of “Porgy and Bess,” made his City Opera debut as Tonio in “Pagliacci.” In so doing, he became the first black man to sing a featured role with a prominent company. The year after Miss Williams’s City Opera debut, Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball. The daughter of Cornelius Booker Williams and the former Fannie Carey, Camilla Ella Williams was born on Oct. 18, 1919, in Danville, Va. Theirs was a singing family, and Camilla, the youngest of four siblings, first sang in church at 8. At 12 she took lessons from Raymond Aubrey, a Welsh singer teaching at local white colleges. Amid Jim Crow, he had to teach his few black students, including Camilla, in a private home. The young Miss Williams earned a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1941 from the Virginia State College for Negroes, now Virginia State University. After graduating, she taught third grade and music at a black school in Danville, though she hoped to become a singer. The next year, a group of Virginia State alumni paid her way to Philadelphia for study with the distinguished voice teacher Marion Szekely-Freschl. There, Miss Williams supported herself by working as an usherette in a movie house. Miss Williams won a Marian Anderson Award, a vocal scholarship established by Miss Anderson, in 1943 and again the next season. Soon afterward, she embarked on a concert career. In 1944 she gave a recital in Stamford, Conn. In the audience was the soprano Geraldine Farrar. One of the most renowned singers of the first half of the 20th century, Miss Farrar had been the Met’s first Madam Butterfly in 1907. Captivated by Miss Williams’s voice, she became her mentor, helping her secure a recording contract with RCA Victor and writing to the impresario Arthur Judson with the suggestion that he manage her. On receiving the letter, as Miss Williams recalled in the 1995 interview, a suspicious Mr. Judson telephoned Miss Farrar. “He didn’t believe the great Farrar would take time to write a letter about an unknown little colored girl,” she said. “When Judson confirmed it really was Miss Farrar, he was dumbfounded.” Miss Farrar also arranged for an audition with Laszlo Halasz, City Opera’s director, who had founded the company in 1943. It went well enough that had there not been a war on, Miss Williams might have sung Cio-Cio-San even sooner than she did. “Since Miss Farrar had been one of the greatest interpreters of ‘Madama Butterfly,’ they had thought of that role for me,” Miss Williams said in the same interview. “The war with Japan was on, however, and it was forbidden to perform that opera. ‘If I ever give this opera,’ Mr. Halasz said, ‘call this young girl in to sing for me.’ ” The call came in 1946, and she learned the part of Cio-Cio-San in two months. Reviewing Miss Williams’s debut in The New York Times, Noel Straus wrote, “There was a warmth and intensity in her singing that lent dramatic force of no mean order to the climactic episodes, and something profoundly human and touching in her delivery of all of the music assigned her.” At City Opera, with which she performed regularly until 1954, Miss Williams also sang Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” Mimi in Puccini’s “Bohème” and the title role in Verdi’s “Aïda.” But even there, she said afterward, she was primarily confined to playing “exotic” heroines like Aïda and Cio-Cio-San. European characters largely eluded her. “I would have loved to sing the Countess and Susanna in ‘Le Nozze di Figaro,’ ” Miss Williams said in 1995. “Mozart was so right for my voice. But they were afraid to put me in a white wig and whiter makeup.” Miss Williams also appeared with the Boston Lyric Opera and the Vienna State Opera, among other companies. She was a soloist with some of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, and sang at the White House. She toured worldwide as a recitalist, though her concerts tended to be less well reviewed than her opera work, at least by New York critics. Miss Williams sang Bess in what was then the most complete recording of “Porgy and Bess,” released by Columbia Records in 1951 and featuring Lawrence Winters as Porgy. Her other recordings include “A Camilla Williams Recital” and “Camilla Williams Sings Spirituals.” In 1977, Miss Williams became the first black person appointed to the voice faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she taught until her retirement in 1997. Her death, at her home in Bloomington, was announced by the university, where she was an emeritus professor of voice. Miss Williams’s path crossed Miss Anderson’s many times. At the 1963 March on Washington, she substituted for Miss Anderson, who was stuck in traffic, before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, racing up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” By all accounts, the two women maintained a warm, enduring friendship. Why, then, is Miss Williams’s name not uttered in the same breath as Miss Anderson’s? For one thing, Miss Anderson (1897-1993) spent far longer in the public eye. She had been a cause célèbre since 1939, when she was denied permission to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the D.A.R. in protest and helped arrange a concert by Miss Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, a landmark event that drew 75,000 people and was heard by many more on the radio. For another, the longstanding David-and-Goliath relationship between the scrappy City Opera and the august Met inevitably came into play. “Camilla never did sing at the Met,” Stephanie Shonekan, the co-author of her memoir, “The Life of Camilla Williams” (2011), said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “And that’s something that sort of haunted her all her life. The Met, in many people’s minds, was superior to the New York City Opera. So there’s that tendency, then, to discount what happened at the New York City Opera and count only what happened at the Met.” A third reason, said Professor Shonekan, who teaches ethnomusicology and black studies at the University of Missouri, was rooted in the fact that Miss Williams happened to come of age as a singer toward the start of the civil rights movement, timing that seemed to make her managers wary. “She signed with Columbia Artists, and as we moved into the ’50s, Camilla’s feeling was that Columbia Artists did not want to put her ‘out there’ too much, because they didn’t want her to deal with the race issue,” she said. “And she wouldn’t have anyway: her personality is not to be ‘out there’ with an Afro, holding up her fist. But I think that there was a fear from her management that she would deal with the race issue as other artists were doing at that time.” Miss Williams’s husband of 19 years, Charles T. Beavers, a civil rights lawyer who was the court-appointed defense counsel for Thomas 15X Johnson, one of three men convicted of murdering Malcolm X in 1965, died in 1969. No immediate family members survive. On Jan. 7, 1955, when Miss Anderson made her Met debut as Ulrica in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera,” Miss Williams was in the audience as her invited guest. Both women were keenly aware of the significance of the evening, but both, Miss Williams recalled, were also mindful of a night in May nine years earlier. “As the first African-American woman to appear with a major American opera company,” Miss Williams said in 1995, “I had opened the door for Miss Anderson.” René Morel, Master Restorer of Rare Violins, Dies at 79

BY MARGALIT FOX November 19, 2011

René A. Morel at work, about 1979. A book was written on his restoration of a 1707 Stradivarius. (Eva Rubinstein/The New York Times)

René A. Morel, a world-renowned surgeon whose clients had names like Perlman, Zukerman and Ma and whose patients had names like Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati, died on Wednesday in Wayne, N.J. He was 79. The cause was cancer, according to a spokesman for Tarisio Fine Instruments and Bows, the New York auction house at which Mr. Morel maintained his shop. For decades, Mr. Morel reigned as one of the world’s master luthiers. The word, pronounced loo-TYEY, is from the Old French for “lute-maker.” It now denotes a maker or restorer of stringed instruments in general and of bowed string instruments in particular. Mr. Morel, who specialized in restoration, was widely described as among the finest violin restorers — perhaps the very finest — of his day, a calling that requires the skills of a diagnostician, acoustician and microsurgeon in equal measure. At his death, he presided over René A. Morel Adjustments, on West 54th Street, whose very name testifies to the precise, incremental nature of his art. There, at his previous shops and in hotel rooms and concert halls around the world, he was consulted, often in panic, by some of the brightest luminaries ever to hold a bow. Among them were the violinists Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman and the cellists Pablo Casals, Yo-Yo Ma and Bernard Greenhouse. (Mr. Morel’s two-year restoration of Mr. Greenhouse’s 1707 Stradivarius is the subject of a 2001 book, “The Countess of Stanlein Restored,” by Nicholas Delbanco.) “Basically, he was ‘my guy’ as far as adjusting the violin went,” Mr. Perlman, who for decades entrusted his instruments, a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius, to Mr. Morel’s ministrations, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Violins, and their siblings, violas and cellos, are temperamental creatures. With tops of spruce and backs and sides of harder wood — often maple — they are fundamentally trees, reconfigured in strange and glorious ways that nature never intended. For these instruments, every bump and jostle, every change in temperature or humidity, is occasion for protest. Wood shrinks and swells and strains against itself. Cracks can appear. Their sonorous voices can be reduced to growls and grumbles. Enter Mr. Morel. “René was really committed to the instrument as a musician’s tool,” Sam Zygmuntowicz, a prominent New York violinmaker who trained under Mr. Morel, said on Friday. “He was not trying to stabilize something to sit in a museum: he was trying to make something that could really be taken on the road and put through its paces in the most demanding of settings.” René Alfred Morel was born in Mattaincourt, in northeast France, on March 11, 1932. His father was a violinmaker, as was his maternal grandfather. At 12, René began his training nearby in Mirecourt, a renowned French violinmaking center. Dexterous, technically minded and a keen pilot, he also built an airplane as a youth. It was by all accounts a luthier’s airplane, made principally of wood. Whether it was actually flyable is unknown. After serving in the French Air Force as a young man, Mr. Morel moved to the United States. In 1955, he joined the Rembert Wurlitzer Company, a distinguished New York violin dealer. He later spent 30 years as a partner in Jacques Français Rare Violins in Manhattan. To legions of musicians, Mr. Morel, attired unvaryingly for work in a blue smock, was a comforting constant. For some, like Mr. Greenhouse, he did major surgery, which could entail an instrument’s lying in pieces on the workbench for months or more. But his work also encompassed far less invasive, though no less crucial, adjustments. These involved the ear as much as the hand and, as Mr. Perlman described the process, typically went like this: A player would enter the shop, instrument in hand. Mr. Morel would ask how it was sounding, and the player demonstrated. “Aha; very interesting,” Mr. Morel would say. Then, with a slender tool, he might reach inside the instrument and, almost imperceptibly, move one of its vital internal organs — the soundpost, the wooden dowel that fits between the top and the back and transmits vibrations from one to the other. The player played some more, and the process was repeated until the sound was sublime. Mr. Morel, a nonplayer himself, had a failsafe way of knowing precisely when that was. “He would put up his sleeve and say, ‘You see the goose bumps,’ ” Mr. Perlman recalled. “He said as long as he didn’t get the goose bumps, it was not properly adjusted.” Mr. Morel, who was divorced, lived in Rutherford, N.J. He is survived by three children, Evelyne, Fran and Pascal; two siblings, Paulette and Jean-Paul; his companion, Christa Nagy; and grandchildren. He is also survived by a generation of string players, now at loose ends. “I was talking to my wife today, and I said, ‘What am I going to do now?’ ” Mr. Perlman said on Thursday. “I’m going to have to find somebody that can produce goose bumps.” Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87

BY MARGALIT FOX April 29, 2010

It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television. It is, of course, the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area. A pop-cultural totem, the Anthora has been enshrined in museums; its likeness has adorned tourist memorabilia like T-shirts and ceramic mugs. Like many once-celebrated artifacts, though, the cup may now be endangered, the victim of urban gentrification. The Anthora seems to have been here forever, as if bestowed by the gods at the city’s creation. But in fact, it was created by man — one man in particular, a refugee from Nazi Europe named Leslie Buck. Mr. Buck, a retired paper-cup company executive, died on Monday, at 87, at his home on Long Island, in Glen Cove. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Robert said. Mr. Buck, previously a longtime resident of Syosset, N.Y., also had a home in Delray Beach, Fla. The Anthora has spawned a flock of imitations by competitors over the years, but it was first designed by Mr. Buck for the Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Conn. Mr. Buck’s cup was blue, with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora. (“Anthora” comes from “amphora,” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent, his son said.) Some later imitators depict fluted white columns; others show a discus thrower. On front and back, Mr. Buck emblazoned the Anthora with three steaming golden coffee cups. Above them, in lettering that suggests a Classical inscription, was the Anthora’s very soul — the motto. It has appeared in many variant texts since then; Mr. Buck’s original, with its welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility, was simply this: We Are Happy To Serve You. Though the Anthora no longer dominates the urban landscape as it once did, it can still be found at diners, delis and food carts citywide, a squat, stalwart island in a sea of tall, grande and venti. On the street, it warms the harried hands of pedestrians. Without the Anthora, “Law & Order” could scarcely exist. Laszlo Büch was born on Sept. 20, 1922, to a Jewish family in Khust, then in Czechoslovakia. (It is today in Ukraine.) His parents were killed by the Nazis during World War II; Laszlo himself survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After the war, Mr. Buck made his way to New York, where he Americanized his name and ran an import-export business with his brother, Eugene, who had also survived the camps. In the late 1950s or thereabouts, the brothers started Premier Cup, a paper-cup manufacturer in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Leslie Buck joined Sherri Cup, then a startup, in the mid-’60s. Originally the company’s sales manager (for a time, he was its entire sales force), he later became its director of marketing. Sherri was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success. Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription. Besides his son, Robert, and brother, Eugene, Mr. Buck is survived by his wife, the former Ella Farkas, whom he married in 1949; two daughters, Beverly Eisenoff and Linda Rush; and four grandchildren. In recent years, with the gentrification of the city and its brew, demand for the humble Anthora has waned. In 1994, Sherri sold 500 million of the cups, as The New York Times reported afterward. In 2005, the Solo Cup Company, into which Sherri had been absorbed, was selling about 200 million cups a year, The Times reported. Today, Solo no longer carries the Anthora as a stock item, making it only on request. Other companies still turn out versions of the cup, though not in the quantities of its 20th-century heyday. But given the tenacious traditionalism of many locals (“Avenue of the Americas,” anyone?), it is safe to assume that the Anthora and its heirs will endure, at least for a while, in the city’s steadfast precincts. For some time to come, on any given day, somewhere a New Yorker will be cradling the cup, with its crisp design and snug white lid, the stuff of life inside. Ruth M. Siems, Inventor of Stuffing, Dies at 74

BY MARGALIT FOX November 23, 2005

Ruth M. Siems, a retired home economist whose best-known innovation will make its appearance, welcome or otherwise, in millions of homes tomorrow, died on Nov. 13 at her home in Newburgh, Ind. Ms. Siems, an inventor of Stove Top stuffing, was 74. The cause was a heart attack, according to the Warrick County coroner’s office in Boonville, Ind. Ms. Siems (pronounced “Seems”) spent more than three decades on the staff of General Foods, which introduced the Stove Top brand in 1972. Today, Kraft Foods, which now owns the brand, sells about 60 million boxes of it at Thanksgiving, a company spokeswoman said. Prepared in five minutes on the stove or in the microwave, Stove Top stuffing comes in a range of flavors, including turkey, chicken, beef, cornbread and sourdough. Comforting or campy, Stove Top stuffing is an enduring emblem of postwar convenience culture. Its early advertising tag line, “Stuffing instead of potatoes?” remains in the collective consciousness. As Laura Shapiro, the author of “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America” (Viking, 2004), said in a telephone interview yesterday: “Stove Top made it possible to have the stuffing without the turkey, probably something no cook would ever have dreamed of but people eating Thanksgiving dinner might well have thought of: ‘Take away everything else; just leave me here with the stuffing!’ It’s kind of like eating the chocolate chips without the cookies.” Stove Top’s premise is threefold. First, it offers speed. Second, it divorces the stuffing from the bird, sparing cooks the nasty business of having to root around in the clammy interior of an animal. Third, it frees stuffing from the yoke of Thanksgiving; it can be cooked and eaten on a moment’s notice any day of the year. In 1975, General Foods was awarded United States Patent No. 3,870,803 for the product, generically called Instant Stuffing Mix. Ms. Siems is listed first among the inventors, followed by Anthony C. Capossela Jr., John F. Halligan and C. Robert Wyss. The secret lay in the crumb size. If the dried bread crumb is too small, adding water to it makes a soggy mass; too large, and the result is gravel. In other words, as the patent explains, “The nature of the cell structure and overall texture of the dried bread crumb employed in this invention is of great importance if a stuffing which will hydrate in a matter of minutes to the proper texture and mouthfeel is to be prepared.” A member of the research and development staff at General Foods, Ms. Siems was instrumental, her sister Suzanne Porter said, in arriving at the precise crumb dimensions — about the size of a pencil eraser. Ruth Miriam Siems was born in Evansville, Ind., on Feb. 20, 1931. She earned an undergraduate degree in home economics from Purdue University in 1953, and after graduation took a job at the General Foods plant in Evansville, where she worked on flours and cake mixes. She moved to the company’s technical center in Tarrytown, N.Y., not long afterward. Ms. Siems retired in 1985. Besides Ms. Porter, of Copley, Ohio, Ms. Siems is survived by another sister, Rosemary Snyder, of Chicago; and a brother, David, of Milford, Mich. As a mark of just how deeply inscribed on the American palate Ms. Siems’s stuffing has become, there are several recipes, available on the Internet, that promise to reproduce the taste of Stove Top from scratch, using fresh ingredients. About TBook Collections

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