AP Obits--11/25
ObitsMan
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Obituaries in the News
Tue Nov 25, 9:20 PM ET
By The Associated Press
Sylvia Bernstein
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sylvia Bernstein, a native Washingtonian who championed
civil rights and fought to desegregate the city in the 1950s, died Sunday. She
was 88.
The daughter of Russian immigrants, Bernstein worked to desegregate area
restaurants, an amusement park and public swimming pools and playgrounds. She
advocated home rule for the District of Columbia, protested the Vietnam War and
the development of nuclear weapons.
Over the years, she and her husband, Albert, a union activist, made their home
in Silver Spring, Md., into a salon of sorts, where thinkers and activists met
to debate. Mr. Bernstein died in February.
Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of
government scrutiny. Mrs. Bernstein invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid
revealing her party ties to Congress but openly campaigned on behalf of
convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953.
While she was not rallying against it, Mrs. Bernstein also worked briefly for
the federal government. She was a secretary for the War Department in the 1930s
and, decades later, volunteered in the White House, answering letters to first
lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mrs. Bernstein's lifelong commitment to social causes is chronicled in her son
Carl's 1989 memoir, "Loyalties." Carl Bernstein is the former Washington Post
investigative reporter, who along with Bob Woodward, broke a series of
Watergate break-in stories that led to President Nixon's resignation.
___
Harold Burdick
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — Harold "Hal" Burdick, publisher and president of the El
Paso Times from 1982 until 1986, died Thursday. He was 78.
Burdick began his newspaper career in 1948 in advertising sales at newspapers
in Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio. Before coming to the Times, he was publisher of
the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W.Va.
Burdick is survived by three sisters, a brother, three sons and four daughters.
___
Paul J. Haskins
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Paul J. Haskins, a former editor at The Kansas City
Times and The New York Times, died of pneumonia Sunday in Cancun, Mexico. He
was 62.
Haskins began working for The Kansas City Times as a copy boy in 1958. He rose
to the position of metropolitan editor before leaving in 1982 to join The New
York Times, where he became an editor on the national desk.
He directed reporters who contributed to coverage of the Hyatt Regency skywalk
collapse in 1981. Both the Kansas City Times and The Star won the 1982 Pulitzer
Prize for general local reporting.
Dean Baquet, the New York Times' editor in the mid-1990s, said Haskins often
made critical decisions on fast-breaking stories, such as in the aftermath of
the Oklahoma City bombing.
He is survived by his wife and five children.
___
Florence Curl Jones
REDDING, Calif. (AP) — Florence Curl Jones, a Native American healer and the
spiritual leader of the Winnemem band of Wintu Indians in Shasta County, died
Saturday. She was 95.
Jones was revered among many tribes for her healing abilities using native
plants and her strict adherence to traditional ways.
She also fought for the protection of sacred Indian land, working to get the
Winnemem band returned to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' list of officially
recognized tribes.
Jones was also the most fluent speaker of the tribe's endangered language and
helped foster its revival.
Jones' mother was 60 years old when she gave birth to Jones along the banks of
the McCloud River, south of Mount Shasta.
"They immediately decided she was special," said Toby McLeod, a filmmaker who
depicted Jones' life in the 2001 documentary "In the Light of Reverence."
__
Hugh Kenner
ATHENS, Ga. (AP) — Hugh Kenner, the author and literary critic who argued
that expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is the best English language
representative of literary modernism, died Monday. He was 80.
In his monograph "The Pound Era," the literature professor argued that Pound
was the first to portray the altered perception of time created by Albert
Einstein's scientific theories.
Kenner's thoughts are contained in 25 books of his own, contributions to 200
other books, nearly 1,000 articles and numerous broadcasts and recordings.
His guide to literary modernism was considered to be definitive. "Dublin's
Joyce" (1956) and "The Pound Era" (1971) are among his best known books. He
taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins
University and the University of Georgia.
___
Eugene Kleiner
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Silicon Valley pioneer Eugene Kleiner, whose ideas and
money spawned a brood of high-tech giants, died Thursday. He was 80.
Kleiner played a pivotal role in building Silicon Valley, first as a scientist,
then as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. In the 1950s, Kleiner helped
lay the groundwork for one of Silicon Valley's seminal companies, Fairchild
Semiconductor.
The company revolutionized the chip industry and became an entrepreneurial
breeding ground, hatching Intel Corp., National Semiconductor and Advanced
Micro Devices.
During the early 1970s, Kleiner founded one of nation's most powerful venture
capital firms, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, which has financed a long
line of high-tech powerhouses, including Sun Microsystems, Tandem Computers,
Compaq Computer and Amazon.com.
A native Austrian who fled Europe before World War II, Kleiner settled in
California during the mid-1950s after being recruited by Nobel Prize winner
William Shockley to help build computer transistors.
___
Ed Schempp
HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) — Ed Schempp, whose lawsuit against compulsory Bible
reading in public schools preceded a landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision
declaring the practice unconstitutional, died Nov. 8. He was 95.
Schempp, a Unitarian and a self-taught electrical engineer from Philadelphia,
filed the suit in 1956. He did so after a school reprimanded his 16-year-old
son for reading from the Koran instead of the Bible during daily reading
sessions.
Ellery Schempp planned the reading in protest of a 1949 Pennsylvania law
requiring students to read 10 Bible verses each day, followed by a recitation
of the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
"I picked the Koran because it was another holy book that happened to be handy
at the time," Schempp, now 63, said. "I wanted to indicate that Christ and the
Bible were not the only holy scriptures of the world."
Three years after his father sued, a panel of three judges in Philadelphia
ruled the law unconstitutional. The school appealed to the Supreme Court. On
June 17, 1963, the court decided 8-1 to outlaw required Bible reading in public
schools.
Schempp attracted much less attention in the legal fight than Madalyn Murray
O'Hair, an outspoken atheist who had filed a similar suit in Baltimore and who
gained widespread notoriety.
___
Margaret Singer
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Psychologist Margaret Singer, an expert on
brainwashing and cults, died Sunday. She was 82.
Singer studied the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidian and Symbionese Liberation
Army among other groups
Singer began studying brainwashing in the 1950s at Walter Reed Institute of
Research in Washington, D.C., where she interviewed U.S. soldiers taken
prisoner during the Korean War.
Singer testified in the 1976 bank robbery trial of newspaper heiress Patricia
Hearst, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She interviewed
more than 3,000 cult members, assisted in more than 200 court cases, and was a
leading authority on schizophrenia and family therapy.
Singer was the author of "Cults in Our Midst," a 1995 study on cults that she
revised earlier this year with analysis of the connection between cults and
terrorism.
___
David Stern III
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — David "Tom" Stern III, a former newspaper publisher in
New York and Philadelphia whose novel "Francis, the Talking Mule" inspired a
film series, died Saturday. He was 94.
Stern spent 30 years in the newspaper business, filling management positions at
the New York Post, the Philadelphia Record and the Courier Post in Camden, N.J.
In 1949, Stern and some associates bought the New Orleans Item, which he ran
until 1958.
As an Army captain during World War II, Stern helped publish Stars and Stripes
for soldiers. It was during the war that he came up with the idea for a novel
about a talking mule named Francis.
The book told the story of a gifted Army mule whose advice to a bumbling young
lieutenant wins battles and astounds the high brass. Stern wrote screenplays
for the series of "Francis, the Talking Mule" films that starred Donald
O'Connor between 1949 and 1956.
Stern is survived by his wife, stepdaughter and son.
___
W. Fred Turner
PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — W. Fred Turner, the attorney who successfully
defended Clarence Earl Gideon in a U.S. Supreme Court mandated retrial in 1963,
which resulted in the creation of the American public defender system, died
Monday. He was 81.
The landmark case began at a pool hall in 1961 when a patron told police he saw
Gideon, then 50, steal change and cases of beer, wine and Coke before leaving
in a cab. Gideon repeatedly asked for a court-appointed attorney, but a judge
denied his request.
After writing a petition that Gideon should have had a lawyer to the Supreme
Court, the justices ruled that criminal defendants are entitled to legal
representation even if they cannot afford a lawyer. The case resulted in the
creation of public defender systems across the nation.
Turner won an acquittal in the second trial. He asked jurors how Gideon could
have made off with several drinks cases when the cab driver testified he had
nothing with him.
___
Teddy Wilburn
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Teddy Wilburn, half of the country music duo the
Wilburn Brothers, died Monday. He was 71.
Wilburn and his brother, Doyle, had 30 songs on the country charts from 1955 to
1972, including the hits "Hurt Her Once for Me," "Trouble's Back in Town" and
"Roll, Muddy River."
Doyle Wilburn died of cancer in 1982.
Teddy Wilburn was born in the Ozark Mountain community of Hardy, Ark. He and
Doyle first performed publicly at ages 6 and 5, with the Wilburn Family band.
After recording on Decca records as the Wilburn Brothers, Teddy and Doyle
joined the Grand Ole Opry cast.
Between 1963 and 1974, the Wilburn Brothers were hosts of one of country
music's first syndicated color TV shows. In 1972 they were nominated for the
Country Music Association's Vocal Group of the Year award.