Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Elliot Handler, American businessman, co-founder of Mattel, namer of the Barbie doll, creator of Hot Wheels, died from a heart failure he was , 95


Elliot Handler was the co-founder of Mattel. With his wife, he was a developer of some of the biggest-selling toys in American history, including Barbie dolls, Chatty Cathy, Creepy Crawlers and Hot Wheels. 

(April 9, 1916 – July 21, 2011)

Family and education

Handler was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 9, 1916, and grew up in Denver, Colorado.[3] He studied industrial design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He married Ruth Moskowicz and they had a daughter who is the namesake of Barbie dolls and a son who died in 1994 of a brain tumor, but who was the namesake of Ken dolls.[4][5]

Mattel

Mattel was named after business partners Harold Matson and Elliot Handler. Elliot's wife, Ruth, took over Matson's role when the Handlers bought out his share in the late 1940s. Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of the Barbie doll that debuted in 1959 and which Ruth named after their daughter Barbara Handler. The Barbie doll is still one of the top-selling dolls. Mattel introduced the talking Chatty Cathy doll in 1960.
Later talking dolls included Chatty Baby, Charmin' Chatty, and toys made for cartoon favorites, such as Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig. Television characters, such as Herman Munster and Mr. Ed, were also transformed into Mattel talking toys. The pull string talking mechanism in these dolls and toys revolutionized the toy industry.
Elliot Handler had a direct hand in the production of two Mattel product lines. In 1966 Mattel introduced smaller dolls called Liddle Kiddles. Handler claimed he wanted them to resemble little children in neighborhoods across America. They were sculpted by doll artist Martha Armstrong-Hand. Kiddles were a great success and continued to be produced in different versions until the early 1970s. Another product line was Hot Wheels, introduced in 1968, which gave rise to 10,000 different models.[5]

Later life

Originally called Mattel Creations, it has gone on to become the largest toy maker in the world. In April 2008, Handler was honored by Mattel with a 90th birthday party at its headquarters in El Segundo, California. Guests included his daughter Barbara Segal, after whom the Barbie doll was named.[5]
Handler died of heart failure at home in Century City, a district of Los Angeles, California, at age 95 on July 21, 2011.[5] Ruth Handler died in 2002.[3] He was survived by his 70 year-old daughter Barbara.

 

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William Hildenbrand, American government officer, Secretary of the United States Senate (1981–1985) died he was , 89

William F. Hildenbrand was an American government officer who served as the Secretary of the United States Senate from 1981 to 1985 died he was , 89.

(November 28, 1921 - July 21, 2011)

Hildenbrand was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, on November 28, 1921.[1] He enlisted in the United States Army in 1942 during World War II and was sent to Europe in the infantry.[1] He returned to Philadelphia following the end of World War II, where he worked as a radio announcer.[1] He was once again deployed by the Army during the Korean War.[1]
Hildenbrand was hired as a congressional staffer by Rep. Harry Haskell, a Republican from Delaware, in 1957, based moved to Washington D.C.[1] Haskell lost his bid for re-election in 1958, so Hildenbrand took a position with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.[1] In 1969, Hildenbrand returned to the Capitol when he was hired as a staff member for the Republican Minority Whip, Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.[1]
Hildenbrand became the Secretary for the Minority of the Senate in 1974.[1] Republicans won control of the United States Senate in the 1980 Senate elections and took control of the chamber in January 1981.[1] Hildenbrand aided Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker in the the transition from Democratic control to Republican control, the first such transfer of party control in the Senate in twenty-six years.[1]
The Republicans named Hildenbrand as the Secretary of the United States Senate in 1981.[1] He served as Secretary until his retirement in 1985.[1]
Hildenbrand released a memoir entitled, When the Senate Cared, in 2007.[1] He also added his stories and history to the Senate's oral history archive for preservation.[1]
Hildenbrand died on July 21, 2011, at the age of 89. The United States Senate passed a resolution honoring him for his service to the chamber.[1]

 

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Bruce Sundlun, American politician, Governor of Rhode Island (1991–1995) died he was , 91.

Bruce Sundlun (born Bruce George Sundlun) was an American politician and member of the Democratic Party who served as 71st Governor of Rhode Island from 1991 to 1995. He was Rhode Island's second Jewish governor, and the only Jewish governor in the United States during his two terms. In addition to politics, Sundlun had a varied career as a military pilot, federal attorney, practicing lawyer, corporate executive and university lecturer.

(January 19, 1920 – July 21, 2011),

Early life and education

Sundlun was born in Providence on January 19, 1920 to Walter Irving Sundlun and Jan Zelda (Colitz) Sundlun. His grandparents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.[4] Sundlun attended the Gordon School, Providence Classical High School and Tabor Academy. In 1933 while attending boy scout camp at Camp Yawgoog he fell though ice on a pond and was rescued by a young John Chaffee, and while he was in high school he was track star, excelling in long jump events.[5] Upon finishing college classes begun in 1938, he received a B.A. from Williams College in 1946 after serving during World War II in the United States Army Air Forces flying B-17 bombers in the 8th Air Force in England. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating with a Doctor of Laws degree in 1949.[3]

Military service

While still in college, Bruce Sundlun volunteered for service in the U.S. Army Air Forces Aviation Cadet Program on December 8, 1941, at Westover Field. He was trained as a four-engine bomber pilot at Maxwell Field in Alabama, after basic flight training at the USAAC Southeast Training Center at Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Greenville Army Air Field at Greenville, Mississippi, and George Field in Lawrenceville, Illinois.
During overseas active duty beginning in June 1943, Sundlun served as a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot in the England-based 384th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force at Grafton-Underwood Air Base. His plane the Damn Yankee[6] was shot down over Nazi-occupied Jabbeke, Belgium on 1 December 1943 after the plane was damaged by flak during the bombing of Solingen, Germany, on his 13th mission.[7] He was named an honorary citizen of Jabbeke in 2009 because of the fact that his actions saved countless lives in the town center of Jabbeke.[8] He and his copilot Lt. Andrew J. Boles banked the airplane hard to the left prior to bailing out, crashing it safely into a turnip field at Zomerweg 41, south of the Jabbeke town center.
After six months time cooperating with the French Resistance under the code name Salamander, he made several attempts to enter Spain near Biarritz, and later near Foix. But after a deciding that there was too much danger of capture or loss in the snowy Pyrenees, he made his way on stolen bicycles north-eastward across France and escaped into Switzerland on 5 May 1944 near Fêche-l'Église. Before escaping into Switzerland, he was engaged with the Maquis in acts of sabotage near Belfort against German Army units under the command of Russian defector General Andrey Vlasov.[3][9] Later, he was recruited by Allen Dulles working out of the U.S. Embassy in Bern to reenter France under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services to act as a bombardment spotter for the Allied invasion of Marseilles in August 1944. After a brief service as a pilot of C-54 Skymaster cargo planes into Karachi, and over "The Hump" to Kunming after VE Day, he ferried bombers (B-24 Liberators and B-29 Superfortresses) from the U.S. mainland to Tinian in the Mariana Islands and into other bases in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
In August 1945, Sundlun attained the rank of captain, and left active service at the end of the war. He received the Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross, and Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters from the U.S. military, and in 1977 he received the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur from the French government.[10] Despite ending his active service in 1945, he remained in the U.S. Air Force Reserves and rose through the officer ranks until he retired as a Colonel in 1980 after serving with the 376th Troop Carrier Squadron at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and the 459th Troop Carrier Group, Medium at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland[11]
In September 1948 Sundlun flew surplus B-17 bombers from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona to the newly created state of Israel to help form the Israeli Air Force. Later on 27 November 1979, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Medal by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for his services to the State of Israel.[12][13]

[edit] Bruce Sundlun's Military Awards & Decorations

  USAAF Command pilot

Legal and business career

From 1949 to 1972, Sundlun was a practicing attorney. In 1949, he was appointed by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath to serve as an Assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. and later served as a Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General. From 1954 to 1972, he was in private law practice in both Washington, D.C. and Providence, with the law firms of Amram, Hahn, and Sundlun, and Sundlun, Tirana and Scher.
Sundlun was active as a businessman from the 1960s through the 1990s. He was a pioneer in the jet charter industry in 1964 by being one of the founding members of the board of directors of Executive Jet Aviation (EJA), along with Air Force generals Curtis E. LeMay, and Paul Tibbetts, and entertainers James Stewart and Arthur Godfrey among others, with retired Air Force Brigadier General Olbert F. ("Dick") Lassiter as president and chairman of the board.[14][15] Shortly after incorporation in Ohio, Sundlun arranged financing for EJA by engineering a stock purchase by American Contract Company of Wilmington, Delaware, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad. EJA initially began operations in 1964 with a fleet of ten Learjet 23 aircraft.[16] A few years afterward, a number of financial and legal improprieties were made by Lassiter including the purchase of Boeing 707 and Boeing 727 aircraft in violation of federal law prohibiting railroad ownership of large aircraft. An order by the Civil Aeronautics Board for EJA to either dispose of the large airplanes or for the Penn Central Railroad to divest its $22 million investment led to the near collapse of EJA in 1970.[17] The company's creditors reacted by demanding the removal of Lassiter as president.[18] On July 2, 1970 Sundlun was installed as EJA president, and he set out to rebuild the company. Under his leadership, the big jets were sold and he brought the company into the black. In the process, Sundlun, Robert Lee Scott, Jr. and Joseph Samuels ("Dody") Sinclair, grandson of one of the founders of The Outlet Company of Providence, borrowed $1.25 million from the Industrial Trust Company of Providence to buy out Penn Central's interest in EJA. That purchase was completed in 1972 as part of the Penn Central Railroad's bankruptcy proceedings. When Paul Tibbetts became president of EJA in 1976, he said that the company's turn around, under Sundlun's guidance, was one of the nation's great business success stories of that decade.[19] By the end of Sundlun's presidency, EJA was doing business with approximately 250 contract flying customers and logging more than three million miles per year. Sundlun remained on the Board of Directors of EJA until it was sold in 1984 to a group of investors led by Richard Santulli. The company is still in business with the name of NetJets as one of the holdings of Berkshire Hathaway.
From 1976 to 1988, Sundlun was president and chief executive officer of The Outlet Company, a department store and broadcast communications company in Providence. In close association with Dody Sinclair, he led the diversification of the corporation by expanding its radio and television broadcast communications portfolio in the 1970s and 1980s until it had 147 retail stores and 11 radio and television stations.[20] He presided over the corporation during the 1981 sale of the company's flagship Providence department store, sale of several radio stations, the merger of The Outlet Company with the Rockefeller Group in 1984, and the renaming of the company to Outlet Communications.[20] In 1986 after the Rockefeller family voted to not expand further into broadcast communications, a group of Outlet Communications executives, led by Sundlun, executed a leveraged buyout of the company.[21] Remaining as president throughout the entire merger and leveraged buyout sequence, Sundlun led the doubling of Outlet Communications holdings of licensed television broadcast stations from 4 to 11 across the country. And in his last three years as president between 1986 and 1988, he led the sale of the Outlet Communications stations in Orlando, San Antonio and Sacramento.

Politics and public service

Sundlun ran twice but lost the Rhode Island governorship races in 1986 and 1988, but won it in his third try in 1990, defeating incumbent governor Edward D. DiPrete in a landslide victory 74%-26%,the largest majority for any Rhode Island governor. He won reelection in 1992, but in 1994, he failed to win the Democratic primary against Myrth York, and she was defeated in the general election.
Only one hour after Sundlun's inauguration as governor on January 1, 1991, he announced the closure of 45 banks and credit unions in the state due to the collapse of their private insurer, the Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation (RISDIC).[22] Resolution of the crisis was through Sundlun's creation of the Rhode Island Depositor's Economic Protection Corporation (DEPCO) to manage the assets of closed banks and assure depositor repayment. Sundlun served as the chairman of the DEPCO Board of Directors. Despite considerable political resistance and the permanent closure of several institutions due to their failure to acquire Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or National Credit Union Administration insurance, all depositor funds were repaid in full plus interest, after two and a half years.[23]
During Sundlun's two terms as governor, he took particular interest in expanding Rhode Island as a destination for conventions and tourism. Noting that a shortage of hotels in Providence hindered the city's development as a convention destination by building the Rhode Island Convention Center. Later, he urged the Rhode Island Convention Center Authority to facilitate the building of a hotel that eventually became The Westin Providence.[24][25] He created the Rhode Island Airport Corporation as an entity to revitalize and operate Rhode Island's state airports, and he was responsible for a complete redesign and rebuild of the passenger terminal and airport approach roads at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick.[26][27] In 1992, he aided in the establishment of the Quonset Air Museum at the Quonset State Airport in North Kingstown.[28] He was also was responsible for building the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, and the Jamestown Expressway, as well as arranging the financing of Providence Place Mall, and the relocation of the Woonasquatucket River to permit the construction of Waterplace Park and the Citizens Bank Building in downtown Providence.[29] The Bruce Sundlun Terminal at T.F. Green Airport is named in his honor, and the airport now generates over $2 billion in economic activity annually.[30]
Sundlun served as a co-chairman of the inaugural parade committee for President John F. Kennedy in 1960 and 1961, and was appointed by President Kennedy in October, 1962 as an incorporating member of the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), where he served for 30 years as a director.[31] In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him as a member of the Board of Visitors of the United States Air Force Academy where he served two four-year terms,[32] and that same year, he was appointed by Governor J. Joseph Garrahy as a Rhode Island Commodore. He served a four-year term as a director of the National Security Education Board, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993.[33] Sundlun was a delegate to Democratic National Convention in 1964, 1968, 1980, 1988, and 2000, as well as to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention of 1985. He was a member of the Providence School Board from 1984 to 1990. And from 1995 until his death, Sundlun had been teaching political science and Rhode Island history at the University of Rhode Island as Governor in Residence.[34]

Personal life

From the 1950s to the late-1980s, Sundlun maintained a residence at Salamander Farm, a 130-acre (0.53 km2) estate in The Plains, Virginia, which he named after his wartime identity with the French Underground.[35] From 2004 until his death in 2011, he lived in Jamestown, Rhode Island with his wife Susan, a professional photographer and owner of East Greenwich Photo.[36]
Sundlun had been married five times and has four children. He was the father of WFSB news anchor Kara (Hewes) Sundlun and father-in-law to WFSB news anchor Dennis House.[37] Sundlun admitted paternity after Hewes filed suit in 1993 alleging that Sundlun had fathered her in a relationship with her mother, Judith Vargo (Hewes). During the initial stages of the suit, Sundlun said that a payment to Judith Hewes of $35,000 in 1976 and Kara's adoption by Robert Hewes in the late 1970s had fully absolved him of financial responsibility in the matter.[38] However, Sundlun accepted Kara Hewes fully as his daughter assuring that her college education was fully financed.[39]
Sundlun also had 3 sons from his first marriage to Madeleine Gimbel: Tracy Walter Sundlun, Vice President of Competitor Group, a promoter and manager of marathon races who at 17 coached track at the 1972 Olympic Games and was the youngest ever Olympic coach;[40][41] Stuart Arthur Sundlun, a financial services executive managing the New York operations of Triago;[42] and Peter Bruce Sundlun, a commercial airline pilot with Dominion Aviation Services and Atlantic Southeast Airlines until 2009, becoming a Transportation Security Officer with the Transportation Security Administration.[43] Tracy has a daughter named Felicity, Peter has a son named Hunter, and Kara has two children, Helena and Julian.[3]
Sundlun died on 21 July 2011 at his home in Jamestown, Rhode Island.[2][44] Sundlun was accorded full state and military honors prior to and at his funeral and burial on 24 July 2011.[45] He was buried at Temple Beth El Cemetery in Cranston, Rhode Island.[46]

Media reports and popular controversy

In July 1993, when he thought that three raccoons on his 4-acre (16,000 m2) Newport estate were rabid, Sundlun shot at them with a 12-gauge shotgun. Later the Providence Journal-Bulletin reported that the act was illegal according to state fish and game laws. The day of the publication, Sundlun turned himself in to the state police for arrest stating that ethics was the cornerstone of his administration. The state police reluctantly complied, so the case went to court and Sundlun pleaded guilty. But state officials and his own lawyer Robert Flanders, convinced Sundlun that his actions were not a crime because his estate did not constitute a "compact area" and because the threat of rabies that year had led the state to waive restrictions on shooting raccoons. His guilty plea was withdrawn and all charges were dropped.[47]
In December 1997, in East Greenwich, Sundlun attempted to purchase some plastic forks from a nearby CVS/pharmacy convenience store for a Christmas party he was attending. Police were called after an argument over Sundlun and the teenaged employees for not complying with his requests. Sundlun eventually issued an apology to the workers and the pharmacy chain for his actions.[48]
On February 24, 2009, Sundlun was involved in a dispute over place in line at branch of Citizens Bank in East Greenwich. Sundlun was pushed to the ground by Charles Machado, 59, of Warwick. Sundlun hit his head and was stunned, but he declined to press charges against Machado.[49]
In recent years, Sundlun had been involved in some traffic accidents and traffic violations, which led two Rhode Island police departments, North Kingstown in 2007 and Jamestown in 2009, to convince the state Department of Motor Vehicles in evaluating Sundlun's ability to drive. In 2008, he was admonished by authorities of University of Rhode Island about his driving on the campus after separate incidents in which he drove on the sidewalk, nearly hit a professor who was walking with a cane, and allegedly bumped into a parked car. Sundlun passed the first driving test which was the result of the North Kingstown request. On April 30, 2009, Sundlun voluntarily surrendered his license.[50][51]
On June 4, 2009, Sundlun was on a WPRO radio talk show in which he claimed that he flew a private plane owned by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Votolato, 79, from T.F. Green Airport to Hartford. Within days, Judge Votolato and Sundlun had issued a statement that the judge was in fact in full control of the aircraft. While Votolato's pilot's license had been maintained up to date, Sundlun's commercial pilot's license had expired in the late 1970s.[52]

 

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Kazimierz Świątek, Estonian-born Belarusian Roman Catholic cardinal, Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev (1991–2006) died he was , 96.

Kazimierz Świątek (Belarusian: Казімір Свёнтак, Kazimir Sviontak) was a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who was most known for his resistance to Cold War-era Soviet Communism and for his service in Minsk, Belarus  died he was , 96.. Cardinal Swiatek was the former Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, and Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk. He was a distinguished member of the Polish community in Belarus.

(21 October 1914 – 21 July 2011)

Świątek was born to Polish parents in the municipality of Walk, in what was then the Russian Empire, and which is now the municipality of Valga, Estonia. His family were deported to Siberia during the Russian Revolution. His father then died fighting in the Polish-Soviet War. The future Cardinal lived in newly independent Poland from 1922. After completing his philosophical and theological studies at the seminary in Pinsk, Świątek was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1939, and then was sent to the parish of Prużany.[1][2]
The Soviet Union occupied Pinsk after the Nazi-Soviet Pact divided Poland in 1939. Świątek was arrested by the NKVD in April 1941, and held on death row in Brest for two months.[3] Father Świątek escaped from prison, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and returned to Pruzhany.
In December 1944, the NKVD arrested Swiatek for a second time. The following year he was sentenced to 10 years hard labor in a concentration camp, and spent nine years in Siberia and the north of the Soviet Union, working in the taiga and in the mines. After his release in June 1954, he returned to Pinsk.[4]
In 1988, he was made a Monsignor- a Chaplain of His Holiness- by Pope John Paul II, who in 1991 appointed him Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev and Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk, and on 26 November 1994 created and proclaimed him Cardinal-Priest of San Gerardo Maiella. He was elected as the first President of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Belarus, which according to the church's website "underlines his leading role in the Church in Belarus."[5]
In July 2006, Świątek, then aged 91, his resignation for reasons of age and declining health from the offices of Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev was accepted by Pope Benedict XVI, but he remained Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk until 30 June 2011, when Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, his successor as Metropolitan Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, replaced him also as Apostolic Administrator of Pinsk. On 21 July 2011, Świątek died in Pinsk after a long illness. At the time of his death, he was the second oldest member of the Sacred College of Cardinals. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram to Archbishop Kondrusiewicz and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Belarus expressing his condolences for the Cardinal's death and praising him for his lengthy service as Cardinal Archbishop and his continuing fidelity and loyalty to the Church and to Christ during his periods of imprisonment back in the early years of the Cold War, in the post-war period, when the Church in the Soviet Union had to be largely clandestine.

 

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Monday, November 28, 2011

Elwy Yost, Canadian television host and writer died he was , 86.

 Elwy McMurran Yost, CM a television host, best-known for hosting CBC's weekday Passport to Adventure series from 1965–67, and TVOntario's weekday Magic Shadows, from 1974 until the mid-1980s, and Saturday Night at the Movies from 1974–99 died he was , 86..

(July 10, 1925 – July 21, 2011) was

Early life

Born in Weston, Ontario, the son of pickle manufacturer Elwy Honderich Yost[3] and Annie Josephine McMurran. In his youth, the senior Yost would give his son a dime a week to go see a movie on condition that he'd then recount the plot.[4] Yost graduated from the Weston Collegiate and Vocational School in 1943.[5]
He began studies at the University of Toronto in 1943, and studied engineering but left, in 1944, after failing his exams and joined the Canadian Infantry in 1944. He was honorably discharged in September 1945. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948, he worked variously in construction, at the Canadian National Exhibition, made an independent film with a classmate and acted in summerstock theatre.[3][4] In 1951, he was working in the circulation department of the Toronto Star where he met his future wife, Lila Melby. He also worked in the Avro Canada personnel department from 1953 until 1959 when he and most of the staff were laid off due to the cancellation of the Avro Arrow project. He then worked as an English and History teacher at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate in Etobicoke, Ontario.[3]

Career in television

Through his acting connections, Yost learned that CBC was looking for quiz show panelist.[4] Yost auditioned and, through the the 1960s, appeared intermittently on the CBC as a panelist on shows such as Live a Borrowed Life, The Superior Sex and Flashback. In the late 1960s he created and hosted Yost CBC's Passport to Adventure, featuring classic movie serials, and also assisted in the founding of the Metropolitan Educational Television Authority (META).[3]
He joined the Ontario Educational Communications Authority (later TVOntario) in the early 1970s as a manager and, in 1974, was assisting with the establishment of its regional councils, when he was told OECA had acquired the broadcast rights to three Ingmar Bergmann films and was asked if he had any ideas on how the station could air them in an educational context. Yost packaged the shows as Three Films in Search of God adding educational content in the form of interviews, introductions, and discussions thus creating the model for what became Saturday Night at the Movies,[3] which became the channel's longest-running, and one of its most popular shows.[6] Yost also developed Magic Shadows, which showed classic serials in half-hour early evening installments with introductions providing background and interesting details by Yost, the movie review show Rough Cuts, Talking Film and The Moviemakers.[3]
The format of Saturday Night at the Movies was that of two movies, separated by in-depth interviews conducted by Yost. In the early years the interviews were with local film experts, but the show's producers took the opportunity to interview visiting actors when they had engagements in Toronto. As the show grew in popularity, funds were found to send Yost and a crew to Hollywood to arrange interviews with film personalities. The library includes interviews with the stars of classic films, character actors, directors, screen-writers, composers, film-editors, special-effects people, and sometimes even their children.
Some regular viewers started to plan their Saturday nights so that they could catch just the interview section if they had already seen that night's films. When Yost retired from TVOntario in 1999, a copy of the library of interviews was donated to the Motion Picture Academy.
His son, Graham Yost, is a screenwriter whose most famous credit was the hit 1994 film Speed. Speed was the final movie Yost hosted before retiring from Saturday Night at the Movies in 1999.
Yost wrote four books: Magic Moments from the Movies, Secret of the Lost Empire, Billy and the Bubbleship (also known as Mad Queen of Mordra) and White Shadows.[3]

Later life

Elwy Yost wrote a mystery novel, White Shadows, which was published in 2003.

Death

Yost recovered from "a serious operation" he had in 2005, according to his wife, Lila. He died in Vancouver, British Columbia on July 21, 2011, aged 86.[2]

Honours

In 1999, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.[7]

Bibliography

 

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Lucian Freud, German-born British painter died he was , 88.

 Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter died he was , 88.. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomfiting examination of the relationship between artist and model.

(8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011)

Early life and family

Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and a German Jewish mother, Lucie née Brasch.[4][5] He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, the elder brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.
He moved with his family to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939,[4] having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.[6]

Early career

Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 at Benton End near Hadleigh. He also attended Goldsmiths, University of London from 1942–3.
He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942.
In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan editor, commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower." It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra (-cum-unicorn) and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months. In the early fifties Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio[7] - during this period the artists also worked side by side in London when Swift would visit Freud. He otherwise lived and worked in London for the rest of his life.
Freud formed part of a group of figurative artists that the American artist, Ronald Kitaj, later named "The School of London".[8] This was more a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style (but during the boom years of abstract painting). The group was led by figures such as Francis Bacon and Freud, and included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Reginald Gray, and Kitaj himself. Most of these artists, including Freud, had been championed in, and contributed to, Patrick Swift's X magazine, which ran from 1959–62.
He was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949–54.

Change in style

Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. These works were usually created with thin layers of paint.
From the 1950s, he began to work in portraiture, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, employing impasto. With this technique, he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these paintings are typically muted.
Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog (1951–52) and Naked Man With Rat (1977–78).[9] The use of animals in his compositions is widespread, and often features pet and owner. Other examples of portraits with both animals and people in Freud's work include Guy and Speck (1980–81), Eli and David (2005–06) and Double Portrait (1985–86).[10] He had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables.[11] His portraits solely of horses include Grey Gelding (2003), Skewbald Mare (2004), and Mare Eating Hay (2006).
Freud's subjects were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.[12] In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt."[13]
In art critic Martin Gayford's 2010 book, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Gayford chronicled the forty days he spent with Lucian Freud while sitting for his portrait. Gayford surmised that Freud sought to capture his model's individuality by, as Gayford named it, his "omnivorous" gaze. Gayford also mentions that his final portrait seemed to "reveal secrets—ageing, ugliness, faults—that I imagine...I am hiding from the world..." – suggesting how sharp and penetrating Freud's gaze is.[14]

Later career


"I paint people," Freud said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."[15] Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. He produced a series of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.[16][17][18]
His painting After Cézanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined.
In 1996, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering the whole period of Freud's working life to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945.[19] This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of this portrayal of the Queen in some sections of the British media. The highest selling tabloid newspaper, The Sun, was particularly condemnatory, describing the portrait as "a travesty".[20] In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of Freud's etchings titled "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings" went on display at the Museum of Modern Art.[21]
In May 2008, his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at auction by Christie's in New York City for $33.6 million, setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist.[22]
In November 2008, letters written by Freud were obtained by The Independent under the Freedom of Information Act. They detail his bitter dispute with some of the most powerful figures in the art world after he was asked to represent Britain at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the world's leading contemporary art exhibition. The publicity-shy portrait painter locked horns with gallery officials after a selection committee rebuffed his suggestions of works to show in Italy. The article includes a copy of the letter written by Freud to the British Council complaining about the selection process.[23]

Working process

Painting from life, Freud was apt to spend a great deal of time with one subject, and demanded the model's presence even while working on subsidiary elements. A nude completed in 2007 required sixteen months of work, with the model posing all but four evenings during that time; with each session averaging five hours, the painting took approximately 2,400 hours to complete.[24] A rapport with his models was necessary, and while at work, Freud was characterised as "an outstanding raconteur and mimic".[24] Regarding the difficulty in deciding when a painting is completed, Freud said that "he feels he's finished when he gets the impression he's working on somebody else's painting".[24]
It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened.[24] A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished, as a reminder that the work was in progress.[24] The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.[24]

Personal life

Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children[25] although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration, and thirteen can be accounted for below. After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry her niece Kitty (real name Kathleen), daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman in 1948. After four years and the birth of two daughters, Annie and Annabel, their marriage ended.[26]
He then began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a celebrated social figure and writer. They married in 1953. The marriage was dissolved in 1959.[26]
Freud also had children by Bernardine Coverley (fashion designer Bella Freud and writer Esther Freud) ; Suzy Boyt (five children); and Katherine Margaret McAdam (four children: Paul Freud, Lucy Freud, David McAdam Freud and Jane McAdam Freud, who is also an artist).[27]

Selected solo exhibitions

Elwy Yost

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elwy Yost
Born
Elwy McMurran Yost
July 10, 1925
Weston, Ontario, Canada
Died
July 21, 2011 (aged 86)
West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation
Television host
Years active
1952–1999
Known for
Spouse
Lila Ragnhild Melby
Children
Christopher and Graham

 

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