Richard Sandomir

His death was confirmed by a family spokeswoman.

Conner thrived as an artist from the late 1940s to the early ’60s, when magazines still prized illustrations for short stories and advertising agencies on Madison Avenue valued artwork over photography to pitch clients’ products.

Conner’s illustrations, largely in gouache, appeared in major magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook and Woman’s Day, and in ads for United Air Lines, Armco Steel, Blue Bell denim and many other companies.

Conner said he wanted to tell a story in all of his work. But he had a pragmatic assessment of its ultimate value. “You don’t give a damn whether it’s hanging on the wall or is put into the trash afterward,” he told The Telegraph in 2015.

The stories he told for advertisers were largely upbeat ones about prosperous, mostly suburban life in the 1950s.

A smiling boy hangs upside down from a tree limb wearing Blue Bell overalls while his sister, also in overalls, rakes leaves below. Another happy boy in a hospital is helped in his recovery by air-conditioning equipment manufactured by Carrier. And a family of four enjoys a day on the verdant grass surrounding an atomic plant made by American Machine &amp; Foundry.

Conner found greater artistic freedom in magazines, whose editors needed him to heighten the impact of the fiction they published.

For “Let’s Take a Trip Up the Nile,” a short story in a 1950 issue of This Week, he depicted a man kneeling before a woman on the landing of a fire escape. Composed like a movie scene, it showed the couple (was he proposing? apologizing?) from a high angle, probably from the floor above them.

For “Veni, Vidi, Video,” a 1949 story in Collier’s about a man trying to woo a woman by purchasing a television set, Conner captured the novelty of the infant medium’s arrival in a home. Again, he used a high angle to set his scene: About two dozen people (and a dog) crowd into a living room, nearly all of them standing transfixed by a boxing match on the screen.

“He’s the only guy with a television, so all the neighbors came to see the game,” Conner said in an interview with Channel 4 in Britain in 2015 when an exhibition of his work that had opened at the Museum of the City of New York came to the House of Illustration in London.

Many of his paintings were for women’s magazines, where he invariably portrayed women as beautiful, sophisticated and fashionable.

“He was alert to changing necklines, styles and glove lengths,” Sarah Henry, deputy director and chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York, said in a phone interview. “His women were powerful figures; he was sympathetic to them and he made them the center of the stories. They definitely weren’t props.”

Conner also had a noirish side, which suited the crime stories he illustrated. For a 1954 yarn in This Week, he captured the shooting of a police officer in a jewelry store. In shades of black, blue and white, he showed the officer clutching his chest after being struck by a bullet; a wisp of smoke snaking out of the killer’s gun; and a frightened little boy watching outside the shop.

McCauley Conner was born on Nov. 12, 1913, in Newport, New Jersey. His parents, Ross and Maud, owned a general store. A shy youngster, Mac admired the work of Norman Rockwell and found it easy to express himself by drawing people, which led him to take a correspondence course in illustration.

Conner sold his first cover illustration to The Saturday Evening Post while still in his teens and later graduated from what the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts). He also studied under the renowned illustrator Harvey Dunn at the Grand Central School of Art, located in the Manhattan terminal of the same name.

“He didn’t like pretty pictures,” Conner said of Dunn, in the Telegraph interview. “He wanted them to tell a story. He was direct — ‘Is that a red dress? Well make it red, dammit!’”

While in the Navy, Conner painted signs and illustrated training materials.

He found enough regular work after the war that he and two partners were able to start a studio in 1950. Their company, Neeley Associates, provided illustrations to magazine publishers and advertising agencies from a team of artists.

Conner’s advertising and magazine work continued for about another decade, until photography became a more favored alternative to illustrations. He shifted to painting cover images for romance novels and eventually shifted again, to illustrating children’s books, including “Dorothy and the Misfit Chimp” (2014), written by Paul Dalio, a step-grandson.

In addition to Dalio, Conner is survived by a stepdaughter, Barbara Dalio; a stepson, Louis Gabaldoni; three other step-grandsons; and three step-greatgrandchildren. His wife, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Conner, an artist who was known as Gerta and whose grandmother founded the Whitney Museum, died in 2009. A cousin, Gloria Vanderbilt, died earlier this year.

Conner was nearing his 101st birthday in 2014 when the exhibition of his work at the Museum of the City of New York opened.

Henry said the exhibition explored “an important moment in American media history,” adding, “It was the heyday of pictorial magazines and Madison Avenue — and how they shaped the way Americans looked at themselves.”

The exhibition opened during the run of “Mad Men,” the hit television series about advertising executives set mainly in the 1960s. The exhibition linked Conner to the show by calling him an “original Mad Man,” although he had never held a job at an ad agency. (He did say, however, that he enjoyed Manhattan during that time, working late and often drinking at the Stork Club.)

When his show moved on to the Delaware Art Museum, in Wilmington in 2017, he reflected on what his younger self had done.

“It’s good for the old ego, of course,” he told the museum in a video, referring to the exhibition. “You look around and see what you’ve accomplished over the years.”

He added: “I can’t even draw a line now. I can’t even draw a line. I look at this stuff and I say, ‘How the hell did that guy do it?’”

This article originally appeared in

Mac Conner, Illustrator for Ads and Magazines, Dies at 105

Mac Conner, a prodigious illustrator whose realistic, colorful and often dramatic paintings for major magazines and advertisers helped lend a distinctive look to postwar popular culture, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 105.

His daughter Wendy Adamczyk said the cause was lung and throat cancer.

Like many other teenagers in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, and his friends Danny Rapp, Frank Maffei and Joe Terranova (also known as Joe Terry), who called themselves the Juvenaires, harmonized in cars and school bathrooms. Their singing on a street corner in Philadelphia in 1957 attracted the attention of John Madara, then a 19-year-old singer, who heard them through his nearby bedroom window.

“The next day I asked some friends, ‘I heard this great group. Do you know who they are?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that was Danny Rapp and the guys,’” Madara recalled in an interview in 2014 with Tom Meros for his online series “Tom TV.” Aware of Madara’s interest in the group, White found his way to Madara’s apartment, where they struck up a friendship and agreed to work together.

Madara suggested they write a song that would play off teenagers dancing the bop on the television show “American Bandstand” and have an infectious beat like Jerry Lee Lewis’ recent rockabilly hit “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” With help from Artie Singer, a vocal coach and producer, they made a demo record, “Do the Bop,” with Madara singing lead and the Juvenaires singing backup. But when Singer and Madara brought the demo to Prep Records, it was rejected.

“Artie took it to Dick Clark” — then a powerful Philadelphia disc jockey as well as the host of “American Bandstand” — “who suggested the title change to ‘At the Hop,’” White said in an interview in 2013 with the blog Milwaukee Opportunities. The group quickly recorded a new version — only the lyrics needed to be changed — with Rapp singing lead.

Clark agreed to play the song and gave it a huge boost in late 1957 when he had the group, now renamed Danny and the Juniors, on “Bandstand.” It leapt to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for seven weeks.

Hoping to repeat the success of “At the Hop,” White wrote “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” in early 1958 while touring with the group in Davenport, Iowa. It was not the hit “At the Hop” was — it peaked at No. 19 — but it acted as an enthusiastic rebuke to adults’ view of rock as a short-lived fad that tore at teenagers’ moral fiber.

“Rock and roll is here to stay,” they sang. “It will never die/It was meant to be that way/Though I don’t know why.”

David Ernest White was born on Nov. 26, 1939, in Philadelphia. When he was 3 he joined his parents, Frank and Marcia Tricker, in their acrobatic touring act, Barry and Brenda and Company. David showed an early interest in music; he began playing piano, clarinet and trombone in elementary school and was writing songs at 14.

The Juvenaires, which White formed when he was about 15, sang at local parties and other events. Sometimes they practiced in White’s 1953 Pontiac so they would not disturb the neighbors.

Danny and the Juniors had a few modest hits after “At the Hop” and “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” but none that kept them atop the charts. White left the group around 1961 and, in partnership with Madara, wrote many songs, including the Top 10 hits “The Fly” (1961), for Chubby Checker; “You Don’t Own Me” (1963), for Lesley Gore; and “1-2-3” (1965), for Len Barry.

In 1965, White, Madara and Ray Gilmore formed a short-lived group, the Spokesmen, and together wrote a single, “The Dawn of Correction,” an optimistic corrective to Barry McGuire’s foreboding No. 1 hit, “Eve of Destruction.” It rose to No. 36 on the Hot 100.

White found less success afterward. He broke up with Madara, released a solo album under the name David White Tricker that did not do well; lived for a time in a trailer park; worked on various musical and film projects, and wrote a memoir that has not yet been published. He also collected royalties from filmmakers and advertisers eager to license songs from his archive, especially “At the Hop” and “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.”

In the late 1960s, Rapp formed an all-new version of Danny and the Juniors that toured the country; at one point, he asked White to join him. While they never reunited, White sang a few songs with Rapp’s group at a lounge near Lake Tahoe in 1982.

“He was real up, he was real excited about seeing me,” White told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I came very close to going back with him because he was working like crazy.”

It was the last time they saw each other. Rapp died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1983.

Terry and Maffei continued to perform occasionally as Danny and the Juniors, along with Maffei’s brother, Bob.

In addition to Adamczyk, White is survived by his wife, Sandra (Simone) White; another daughter, Jody Conrad, and three grandchildren. A third daughter, Linda White, died in 2013.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/obituaries/david-white-dead.html" id="85987f98-a3f8-3688-a077-b39f9ceffbb4">The New York Times</a>.

David White, who formed the doo-wop quartet Danny and the Juniors in the mid-1950s, co-wrote their No. 1 hit, “At the Hop,” and composed their successful follow-up, “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” died March 16 in Las Vegas. He was 79.

David White, Hitmaker With Danny and the Juniors, Dies at 79

Her death was announced in Parliament, where she had served in the House of Lords for 30 years. Her son James told the Press Association, a British news agency, that she died after a fall.

The birth in England in 1978 of Louise Brown, who was conceived using in vitro fertilization, raised a raft of moral and religious questions, none more transcendent than how to regulate the creation of human life in laboratories. There was not yet any oversight of embryological research and infertility treatments, nor was there any consensus about the acceptability of IVF, a technique that was pioneered in Britain.

By the time she was asked by the government to serve as chairwoman of the Committee of Inquiry Into Human Fertilization and Embryology in 1982, Warnock had taught philosophy at Oxford, written books on metaphysics and existentialism, served on government panels that examined special education and laboratory experimentation using animals, and become a well-known guest on television and radio talk shows.

“The task you set the inquiry was not an easy one,” Warnock wrote in a letter to government officials that accompanied the committee’s final report in 1984. “The issues raised reflect fundamental moral and often religious questions, which have taxed philosophers and others down through the ages.”

In a profile of Warnock in The Guardian in 2003, Andrew Brown wrote that her practical approach to solving ethical issues was to “find schemes that everyone could agree would work, and not to deliver moral guidance from axiomatic principles.” He called her a “kind of philosophical plumber to the establishment — whenever some tricky problem arose, she could be trusted to get things flowing again.”

That approach was evident in a passage of the committee’s report:

“Members of the inquiry were reluctant to appear to dictate on matters of morals to the public at large. They were also keenly aware that no expression of their own feelings would be a credible basis for recommendations, even if they all felt exactly alike.

“But,” the report continued, “that moral conclusions cannot be separated from moral feelings does not entail that there is no such thing as moral reasoning.”

The committee’s wide-ranging investigation led to 64 recommendations, including legal protection of human embryos developed in a laboratory and creation of a regulatory body to license and oversee IVF clinics and embryo research.

Central to the report were the legal limits it proposed for the use of human embryos, chiefly its recommendation that no live embryo derived from IVF could be kept alive if it was not transferred to a woman or used for research beyond 14 days after fertilization. The committee said it should be a crime to use a live human embryo for research beyond that.

In 2017, Warnock explained why the 14-day limit had been chosen.

“We did pick on a number of days after which we understood that the embryo began to develop more swiftly toward becoming a curled-up fetus with a spinal cord and a central nervous system,” she wrote in BioNews, a publication of the Progress Educational Trust, an organization that is an advocate on issues like embryology and stem-cell research, and for which she was a spokeswoman.

Not all members of the committee agreed that experimenting on human embryos created through IVF should be allowed; three dissenters wrote in the report that it was “wrong to create something with the potential for becoming a human person and then deliberately to destroy it.”

Parliament adopted most of the report’s recommendations and established the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in 1990.

Sarah Cheshire, chairwoman of the authority, said in a statement that “as reproductive science and society face new and continually evolving challenges, the framework Mary Warnock set out in the 1980s still largely stands the test of time today.”

Warnock was appointed a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1984 and became a life peer the next year, taking the title Baroness Warnock of Weeke and a seat in the House of Lords, from which she retired in 2015.

Helen Mary Wilson was born April 14, 1924, in Winchester, about 60 miles southwest of London. Her father, Archibald, a housemaster and teacher at Winchester College, a boarding school, died before she was born. Her mother, Ethel (Schuster) Wilson, was the daughter of a wealthy German-born banker and did not have to work after her husband’s death.

Warnock said she never missed the father she had never met. She was raised by her mother, whom she recalled as a remote intellectual, and a nanny.

After attending one boarding school in Winchester — where she told the BBC in a 2007 interview that her head “was absolutely crammed with the liturgy and with hymns” — and another in Godalming, in southeast England, she attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she studied classics.

She taught philosophy at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 1949 to 1966 before becoming headmistress of the all-girl Oxford High School until 1972. She also served as mistress of Girton College at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.

In 1949 she married Geoffrey Warnock, a fellow philosopher, who in the 1980s became the vice chancellor of Oxford. They were a formidable intellectual couple who, she said, surprised people by saying they spent considerable time watching sports and the Muppets on television.

“We absolutely adored the Muppets,” she said in an interview with The Telegraph in 2003. “Wonderfully funny.”

Her reputation for immersing herself in difficult moral and philosophical issues blossomed in the 1970s when she was asked by Margaret Thatcher, then the British government’s secretary of state for education and science, to oversee a committee looking into the education of disabled children. Her report, delivered in 1978, set out a landmark plan to bring children with disabilities into mainstream education.

“No civilized society can be content just to look after these children,” the report said. “It must all the time seek ways of helping them, however slowly, toward the educational goals we have identified. To understand the ways in which help can be given is to begin to meet their educational needs. If we fail to do this, we are actually increasing and compounding their disadvantages.”

(Warnock later came to regret the extent to which special-needs children were placed in mainstream classes. In a pamphlet written nearly 30 years later, she said that the system she had once advocated “had ceased to be about what the child needs and has just become a battle for resources.”)

In addition to her son James, her survivors include two daughters, Kitty and Maria, and another son, Felix.

Her husband, who had an incurable lung disease, died in 1995 after his physician increased his dose of morphine. His desire for a dignified death brought Warnock into another philosophical debate.

“Society is getting better at facing the fact that many people at present suffer horrible deaths,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2011 after a British commission suggested a legal framework to allow for the assisted dying of terminally ill people. “We can admit now how deeply we desire a good death, for ourselves, our friends and family; how much we resent the assumption that death must be fended off at all costs, whatever our wishes.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/mary-warnock-dead.html" id="7610174b-e1f6-3a25-a001-ab02abd4989e">The New York Times</a>.

Mary Warnock, an Oxford-educated philosopher who helped provide an ethical pathway for Britain to govern its fledgling infertility treatment and research industry after the first test-tube baby was born, died March 20 at her home in Wiltshire, about 75 miles west of London. She was 94.

Mary Warnock, Who Offered Guidance on Embryo Use, Dies at 94

Her death was confirmed by her sister Jo-Marie Brennan, who said the cause had not been determined.

Ruvolo’s widely publicized kindness toward her attacker provided emotional counterpoint to a senseless act that began in the early hours of Nov. 13, 2004. She was returning home from watching a niece sing at a recital in Amityville, also on Long Island. Her friend Louis Erali was in the passenger seat of her car, a Hyundai.

As another car with three teenagers in it approached hers from the opposite direction on Portion Road, a passenger, Ryan Cushing, then 18, threw the turkey through the open window of the back seat. (The youths had purchased it with a stolen credit card, the authorities later said.)

The turkey crashed through Ruvolo’s windshield, crushing the bones in her cheeks and jaw, fracturing the socket of her left eye, causing her esophagus to cave in and leaving her with brain trauma.

Erali pulled Ruvolo’s foot from the gas pedal, steered the damaged car to a stop and cradled her head until an ambulance arrived.

Ruvolo required extensive reconstructive surgery to her face and months of physical and cognitive rehabilitation before she could return to work as a collection agency manager nine months later.

Suffolk County prosecutors had wanted Cushing to serve the maximum of 25 years in prison for first-degree assault and other offenses. But Ruvolo persuasively argued that a long sentence would only turn him into a hardened criminal. She recalled her reasoning in a post for the Forgiveness Project, a website that collects stories from people who have rebuilt their lives after trauma.

“Had he always been a bully?” she said she had asked prosecutors. “Was he always hurting other people? What could possibly have built up inside him so bad that he had to throw something so hard?”

She added, “I didn’t want Ryan to rot in jail.”

After his guilty plea in August 2005, Cushing — aware that Ruvolo had pressed for a short sentence — stopped to speak to her in the courtroom and wept profusely. She embraced him, stroked his face and patted his back.

“I’m so sorry,” he said to her as he sobbed. “I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” she replied. “I just want you to make your life the best it can be.”

Two months later, at his sentencing hearing in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, he told her: “Your ability to forgive has had a profound effect on me. It has already made a positive change in my life.”

When it was her turn to deliver her victim impact statement, she said that she had not absolved him and that she expected him to accept the consequence of his actions. She added, speaking to him: “There is no room for vengeance in my life. I know you are remorseful.”

Victoria Ann Ruvolo was born in Brooklyn on March 12, 1960, the youngest of seven children of Anthony and Josephine (Buccellato) Ruvolo. Her father was a supermarket foreman, her mother a homemaker. After the family moved to Long Island she graduated from Oceanside High School in Nassau County. She worked for the collection agency for more than 30 years.

In addition to Brennan, she is survived by another sister, Rita Dierna; a brother, Joseph; and a number of nieces and nephews.

Brennan said her family had not been surprised by the compassion Ruvolo demonstrated.

“Not all of us would be that way, but if you knew her, that’s how she was,” she said in a telephone interview. “She had a very special soul.”

After Ruvolo’s recovery, she spoke about empathy and forgiveness at schools and programs like TASTE (Thinking Errors, Anger Management, Social Skills and Talking Empathy), which holds criminals accountable for their actions.

As part of his rehabilitation, Cushing also spoke to TASTE, Robert Goldman, its founder, said by phone.

“Ryan has a job and is a productive member of society,” said Goldman, who collaborated with Ruvolo and Lisa Pulitzer on a book, “No Room for Vengeance ...” (2011). “He did everything Victoria challenged him to do and spoke to kids about the mistakes he made.

“That’s her legacy: She’s an example of forgiveness in a vengeful world.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/obituaries/victoria-ruvolo-dead.html" id="f8371c01-174e-30ea-a39f-6d9e988dcc76">The New York Times</a>.

Victoria Ruvolo, Who Forgave Her Attacker, Is Dead at 59

Victoria Ruvolo, whose face was shattered when a teenager tossed a 20-pound frozen turkey through the windshield of her car in 2004 but who then insisted on mercy in his sentencing, died Monday at her home in Ronkonkoma, New York, on Long Island. She was 59.

His record label, 4AD, said the cause was cancer. He had been living in England since the 1960s.

The Walker Brothers arrived in England in early 1965, reversing the earlier British invasion of America. There, the group — made up of Walker (his real name was Noel Scott Engel), a dramatic baritone who played bass; John Maus, a guitarist and vocalist; and Gary Leeds, the drummer, all of whom used the surname Walker — found the success that had eluded them in the United States.

Though their popularity never reached Beatlemania levels, their fans, like those of the Beatles, would scream during their performances — and, in one harrowing incident, turned over a van taking them from a concert in Dublin.

Evoking the blue-eyed soul of the Righteous Brothers, the Walker Brothers had several hits, two of which rose to No. 1 on the British charts: “Make It Easy on Yourself,” a ballad by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” which had first been recorded by Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons. Both songs also rose to the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.

Scott Walker left the group in 1967 to start a solo career that became a rejection of his rock-star phase. In one iteration he recorded songs by Belgian singer and songwriter Jacques Brel. But his most critical period was a retreat into the studio to create avant-garde music that was hard to categorize: ominous and clangorous, existential and electronic, with big blocks of sound, his baritone voice now used to almost operatic effect. For many years, he did not appear in concert.

Reviewing a recording on which Walker collaborated with the metal band Sunn O))) in 2014, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times described his music as “intricate puzzles of shock, indiscretion, non-resolution, theatrical uses of text and extended technique, often with a 40-piece orchestra.” He added that Walker was always looking for a “whoops factor"— “a moment of incomprehension from the listener.”

In a message on Twitter, Thom Yorke, the lead singer and main songwriter of Radiohead, wrote that Walker had shown him “how I could use my voice and words.”

“Met him once at Meltdown,” he added, referring to the annual music and art festival in England, “such a kind gentle outsider.”

Noel Scott Engel was born on Jan 9, 1943, in Hamilton, Ohio, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, the only child of Noel and Elizabeth Marie (Fortier) Engel. His father was an oil company geologist whose job took the family to various cities. When Scott was about 6 his parents divorced, and he went to live in Denver with his mother.

They subsequently moved to New York, where in the mid-1950s Scott, still a schoolboy, began his entertainment career. He had small roles in the Broadway musicals “Plain and Fancy” and “Pipe Dream” and recorded singles, including “When Is a Boy a Man?” (1957), as Scotty Engel — hoping, without success, to break through as a teenage idol. Many of those songs were later released in the compilation album “Looking Back With Scott Walker” (1968).

Around 1960 he and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where he attended high school and the Chouinard Art Institute. He also played in various music groups, worked as a session bassist and, in 1964, formed the Walker Brothers with Maus (who had already been using John Walker as a pseudonym). They played at the Whisky a Go Go and other clubs along the Sunset Strip.

Although the best-known songs of his Walker Brothers period did not portend how radical his music would become, Scott Walker began to demonstrate a willingness to free himself from the conventions of pop and rock as early as 1967, when he began releasing a series of solo albums — “Scott,” “Scott 2,” Scott 3” and “Scott 4.” He did so again on “Nite Flights” (1978), an album made during a brief reunion of the Walker Brothers.

Along the way, he found an admirer in David Bowie. Bowie, a transcendent musical experimenter, was in a relationship with a woman who had dated Walker and kept his albums. Bowie listened to the music and became so enamored that he later took the role of executive producer of “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” (2007), a documentary directed by Stephen Kijak.

“I like the way he can paint a picture with what he says,” Bowie said in the film. “I had no idea what he was singing about. And I didn’t care.”

Walker, who worked on his albums slowly and meticulously, continued his musical evolution with “Climate of Hunter” (1984). With “Tilt” (1995) and “The Drift” (2006), he drew closer to matching his ambition to his creative visions — and to those that crept into his mind while he slept.

“I have a very nightmarish imagination,” he said in the documentary, which focuses on the recording of “The Drift.” He added: “I’ve had bad dreams all my life. Everything in my life is big, it’s out of proportion.”

“Clara,” a song on “The Drift,” re-imagines the executions of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, at the hands of Italian partisans in 1945. (It was inspired by newsreels Walker had seen as a child.) Another song, “Jesse,” imagines a conversation between Elvis Presley and Jesse, his stillborn twin brother, as a vehicle to write about the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In a plaintive, eerie vocal reminiscent of Bowie, Walker sings:

Fame is a tall, tall tower

A building left in the night

Jesse, are you listening?

It casts ruins in shadows

Under Memphis moonlight

Howard Kaylan, a founding member of the Turtles, said in a 2013 interview that he had been listening to Walker since the 1960s. He was a fan of the Walker Brothers, he said, but thought of Walker’s solo music as the work of genius.

“My jaw hit the ground when I heard ‘Tilt,'” Kaylan told the newspaper Record Collector News. “And by the time he got to ‘Drift,’ I understood what he was doing: He is doing the most conventional pop music I ever heard. He is just doing it as if he was observing it from outer space and then trying to tell you what he saw as an alien.”

Walker’s survivors include his partner, Beverly; his daughter, Lee; and a granddaughter. Maus died in 2011.

Some of Walker’s lyrics were published last year in the book “Sundog,” with an introduction by Irish novelist Eimear McBride, who compared Walker to James Joyce.

“Walker’s work, as Joyce’s before it, is a complex synesthesia of thought, feeling, the doings of the physical world and the weight of foreign objects slowly ground together down into diamond,” McBride wrote. “This is not art for the passive. It does not impart comfort or ease. Tempests will not be reconciled by the final bars, and no one is going home any more.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/obituaries/scott-walker-dead.html" id="ea72c8c8-023d-3d80-a3e6-6a92e112c700">The New York Times</a>.

Scott Walker, who with his American pop group, the Walker Brothers, became a teenage idol in Britain in the 1960s, but who later immersed himself in experimental music that influenced artists like David Bowie and Radiohead, died Friday in London. He was 76.

Scott Walker, Pop Singer Who Turned Experimental, Dies at 76

Her son, Vladimir Turovsky, confirmed the death. She had lived in Germany for more than 15 years.

Turovskaya established a reputation for writing cultural criticism that was erudite and cleareyed — and that managed not to outrage the Soviet authorities.

In making the documentary “Ordinary Fascism” (also known as “Triumph Over Violence”), which was directed by Mikhail Romm, she avoided running afoul of censors because it is substantially an anti-Nazi film.

She and co-writer Yuri Khanyutin dug deeply into archives, including the Soviet Union’s, for Nazi propaganda footage; film from Hitler and Joseph Goebbels’ private collections; soldiers’ amateur film; children’s drawings from the Theresienstadt concentration camp; and photographs of Nazi victims at Auschwitz.

The movie, with Romm as its sardonic narrator, mocked Nazism and juxtaposed images of its evil actions with contemporary film the crew shot in Moscow; Warsaw, Poland; and Berlin — everyday scenes of students, lovers, mothers and children — that stood in counterpoint to the malevolence of fascism.

The overall effect was to draw clear but subtle connections between Nazi Germany and Stalinist horrors without offending the Soviet Union, except to note its people’s sacrifices during World War II.

Jane Taubman, a retired professor of Russian at Amherst College, said the documentary’s target audience had no problem intuiting its meaning. “Russians, whose culture has existed under censorship for the better part of 200 years, are used to reading between the lines (or the frames) of what is called ‘Aesopian language’ to a degree unknown in the West,” she said in an email.

The documentary was released in late 1965 and seen by millions in the Soviet Union.

“Maya said that it led to a lot of self-reflection in the Soviet Union and made people stop and think,” said Olga Gershenson, author of “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe” (2013) and a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “The Soviet press praised the film as an anti-fascist document.”

Turovskaya did little work in film production after “Ordinary Fascism.” Instead, she focused on writing sophisticated film and theater criticism for newspapers, magazines and journals. She wrote books about German playwright Bertolt Brecht, Russian film and stage actress Maria Babanova and Andrei Tarkovsky, the brilliant Soviet director whose striking, often abstract films were admired in the West but banned in his homeland.

Turovskaya wrote that each of Tarkovsky’s films — including the celebrated “Ivan’s Childhood,” about a 12-year-old orphan boy who scouts for the Soviet army during World War II — was a chapter in one long film.

“The subject is but the peg upon which to hang a revelation of the inner world, a world that is not merely a collection of memories but a universe furnished with laws of its own,” she wrote in “Tarkovksy: Cinema as Poetry” (1981). “The elements within this universe are united by what Tarkovsky himself called ‘rhythm.'”

In their book “Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost” (1994), Michael Brashinksy and Andrew Horton, who compared Turovskaya to Susan Sontag for the effortlessness and sophistication of her prose, wrote: “Because Turovskaya, a drama critic first, understands theater so well, she is better than most critics at appreciating film as performance. A connoisseur of belles lettres as well, she is always attentive to the literary core of a film.”

Turovskaya viewed with a gimlet eye the success of the 1960s James Bond films, including “Dr. No,” Thunderball” and “From Russia With Love.”

In a 1966 issue of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir (New World), Turovskaya wrote that “one can speak as ironically as one likes about the rather stupid adventures of brave Bond,” but she suggested that the popularity of the films, based on Ian Fleming’s spy novels, “may be rightfully considered as an index of the monotony and dullness of life” in the West.

Maya Iosifovna Turovskaya was born on Oct. 27, 1924, in Kharkov, Ukraine. Her father, Iosif Turovsky, was an economics professor, and her mother, Fani (Shub) Turovskaya, was a physician. When she was young, her father was arrested and jailed for political reasons. After being released, he worked as an engineer.

“My mother read Freud, my father read the classics,” Turovskaya said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998. “We followed the Spanish Civil War; we were internationalists. My father had been imprisoned, and at least half the children in my class had missing fathers. We were children of the Great Terror.”

She also recalled a family discussion in 1944 after the release of Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Ivan the Terrible, Part I”

“I had an uncle, Isoif Shpinel, who worked as a set designer on ‘Ivan the Terrible,’ and we would have a great discussion at the table: ‘How can you glorify Ivan?’ I asked. ‘Silly girl, I’m working with the great Eisenstein,’ he answered. Everyone who worked with Eisenstein said that.”

After graduating in the 1940s from Moscow State University, where she studied philology, she received a degree in theater science from the State Theater Institute. Following her education, she was hired by a state radio committee but was fired quickly for being Jewish.

Turovskaya began to write about theater, film and culture in the 1950s. But her reputation did not blossom until the next decade, when the Soviet Union was still in a post-Stalin political thaw under Nikita Khrushchev.

By the late 1980s, her renown as a critic, scholar and historian had grown so much that she began to lecture at colleges in the United States and hold informal seminars about film with Russian scholars from Yale, Harvard, Amherst, Columbia and elsewhere.

“She’d show us a couple of films and give us her interpretations,” Taubman said. “She was just full of wonderful information and incredibly generous. She called me Janechik and called Amherst her dacha.”

In 2008, Turovskaya won a Nika Award, the Russian equivalent of an Oscar, from the country’s Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences for her contributions to cinematic science, criticism and education.

In addition to her son, she is survived by a grandson and a sister, Bertha Roginskaya.

Gershenson recalled interviewing Turovskaya a decade ago in a coffee shop in Munich.

“She had a long view of history,” Gershenson said. She quoted her as saying: “I have lived a very long life, I know it very well. Everything is changing. Now, if something is observed at the moment, it does not mean that it always has been. We are all accustomed to imagining that everything is always like this and everything will always be like that. In fact, everything changes all the time. Continuously.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/obituaries/maya-turovskaya-dead.html" id="e654d8bd-be1b-3923-ac47-5267ccef6a03">The New York Times</a>.

Maya Turovskaya, a Russian film and theater critic, once called “the Susan Sontag of Soviet aesthetic thought,” who also co-wrote a popular documentary in the 1960s that drew parallels between Stalin-era totalitarianism and Nazism, died March 4 at her home in Munich. She was 94.

Maya Turovskaya, Russian Critic and Documentarian, Dies at 94

Her nephew Tony Berry said the cause was complications of stomach cancer. She had been in hospice care at home.

Miller believed that helping the sick, elderly and disabled was a critical service that the state of Illinois undervalued by paying thousands of workers poverty-level wages and offering no benefits.

“I took care of some people for 10 or 15 years, trying to give them to same kind of care I would give my own mother,” she said in a document published in 2003 by the Service Employees International Union when Miller was president of Local 880 in Illinois. “And it affects you. When you lose them it hurts the same as if they were a family member.”

Her activism began in earnest in the 1980s when she and her fellow workers were still categorized as independent contractors; while their local was affiliated with the SEIU, it did not have the fundamental right of unions to collectively bargain on behalf of its members. That would not come for many years — one of the many battles Miller helped to lead.

One of Local 880’s earliest fights was to bring all of its workers’ pay up to the prevailing minimum wage of $3.35 an hour; some of their time was deemed by the state as “supervisory pay,” which brought them only $1 an hour. In 1987, when she was a vice president of the local, Miller testified emotionally to the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield, asking lawmakers to consider how poorly she and her fellow workers were paid.

“It was the first time she had ever testified, and she was really intimidated,” Keith Kelleher, a top organizer during Miller’s time at Local 880, recalled in a telephone interview. “She told me, ‘I saw all those fancy people in their fancy suits and dresses and I was just a home-care worker.’ But she told them, ‘Don’t listen with your heads, listen with your hearts. Even if it is legal to pay us $1 an hour, we deserve a living wage.'”

The legislature soon after raised the workers’ pay to $3.50 an hour (the equivalent of $7.65 today) and eliminated the $1 supervisory pay.

Helen Ruth Ashford was born on May 26, 1936, to Buster and Clara Ashford, who managed their farm. Helen attended an all-black high school in segregated Louisville, then moved to Chicago after graduating, finding jobs in industrial laundries and marrying Collin Miller, a construction worker. After about 15 years of laundry work, she became a home-care worker.

Miller continued to work with her home-care clients, taking buses to care for them, even as she became increasingly active in the union.

She organized home care workers in other cities and led rallies and protests in Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. Sometimes, she led union members in the gospel song “Victory Is Mine,” other times declaring that they were like Moses telling the Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Kelleher recalled.

While speaking in 1995 at a White House Conference on Aging, she told the delegates about the home-care workers’ ongoing struggle for pay and respect.

“I love my job,” she said. “But please listen to me. We are never listened to. We make minimum wage without a single benefit, and yet we are the people who keep your mother, your father, your sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts out of nursing homes.”

She added: “We aren’t the greedy. We are the needy.”

After serving as the local’s treasurer and vice president, she was elected its president in 1999, serving for eight years until her retirement.

She also helped voter registration drives in the 1990s directed by Project Vote, which was led by Barack Obama before he was elected an Illinois state senator.

The union’s hard work paid off. Wages rose, fitfully, and in 2003, Illinois passed legislation that allowed the local to bargain collectively for its members. That right led home-care workers to negotiate for health insurance and take advantage of a state-funded education and training program that is now named for Miller.

She is survived by a sister, Johnnie Wells, and a brother, Hayward Ashford.

Kelleher said that during his visit to her last month, Miller still sounded like an agitated union leader.

“There she was, with stage 4 stomach cancer,” he said, “and as I walk in the door she starts saying, ‘Keith Kelleher, Local 880, I’m fired up! I can’t take it no more!’ That was one of our chants when we were going up against the state or a private company. And she’s still saying it on her deathbed.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/obituaries/helen-miller-dead.html" id="83475268-8b44-3d86-a46a-5cc1b9457bcf">The New York Times</a>.

Helen Miller, who took care of the sick and the elderly for nearly 40 years in Chicago while championing her fellow home care workers, fighting for greater pay and benefits as a union leader and speaking eloquently about the dignity of their work, died on March 5 in Louisville, Mississippi, where she was born. She was 82.

Helen Miller, Home-Care Worker and Union Leader, Dies at 82

His son Brian confirmed the death.

In 1969, when he began his conversations with Sayers, Silverman was well-known in sports publishing. He had been a prolific freelance writer in the 1950s for various magazines, including Sport, a popular monthly, which hired him as its editor-in-chief in 1960, and where he was still working. He had also written books about, or with, sports figures like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Robinson.

In Sayers, who was 26, Silverman had a sensational young player as a subject: In his first three seasons, beginning in 1965, his speed and elusiveness had made him a superstar. But an injury to his right knee during a game in 1968 imperiled his career; he was still recovering when he began to tell his life story to Silverman, who wrote about his regimen of physical rehabilitation for Sport.

Their book, “I Am Third” (1970), contained one chapter called “Pick,” about his friendship with Piccolo, who died of lung cancer in 1970. (The book’s title refers to a sign Sayers had seen on his college track coach’s desk: “The Lord is first, my friends are second, and I am third.”)

“As much as they cut into this man, as much as he was inflicted with terrible pain and discomfort, as much as he was faced with all these tortures, his spirit would not be destroyed,” Sayers and Silverman wrote. “That was the beautiful nature of Brian Piccolo.”

The story told in that chapter became the basis for “Brian’s Song,” a tear-jerker that starred Billy Dee Williams as Sayers and James Caan as Piccolo and became one of the most-watched TV movies of all time. It won the 1972 Emmy Award for outstanding single program. It was remade for television in 2001 with Mekhi Phifer and Sean Maher.

“I don’t remember my father talking about his greatest projects, but in terms of royalties, it was the best,” Brian Silverman said by telephone.

Silverman left the sports world in 1972, when he joined the Book-of-the-Month Club mail-order concern as executive vice president and editorial director. While there, Silverman understood that smart marketing was as important as selecting the right books for its broad swath of readers.

“He had a great gift for creating an event out of an editorial decision and making book-club members feel like participants in the event, at a time when book clubs were considered predictable,” Larry Jacobs, the club’s former executive editor, said in an email.

During his 16 years at the Book-of-the-Month Club, Silverman rose to president and later chief executive before joining Viking Books as a general editor.

“The thrill was working for the first time in my life with writers, which you don’t do at Book-of-the-Month Club,” he told Publishers Weekly in an interview in 2002. “At Viking I was given great writers to work with, including William Kennedy, Robertson Davies and Saul Bellow.”

Al Silverman, a magazine editor and publishing executive who collaborated with Chicago Bears halfback Gale Sayers on an autobiography that was adapted into “Brian’s Song,” the popular 1971 television movie about the friendship between Sayers and his dying teammate, Brian Piccolo, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Richard Sandomir

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