William Sokolin, Wine Seller Who Broke Famed Bottle

Do be careful.

William Sokolin holding the bottle broken at the Four Seasons in 1989. It was insured. Credit William E. Sauro/The New York Times

The slightest mishap can cause someone to cry over their beer, or shed tears over spilled milk, but on April 23, 1989, at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, nobody could have blamed William Sokolin if he had sobbed over a broken bottle of wine.

Not just any bottle, even by Four Seasons standards, where a double magnum of Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, St. Julien 2008 now goes for $2,700. The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke that night was a 1787 Château Margaux, which had been found in a Paris cellar in 1985 and was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. (It was inscribed with the initials Th.J.) Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.

A wine merchant for more than a half-century, Mr. Sokolin died of heart failure at 85 on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan, his son, David, said.

He was born on April 25, 1930, the son of David Sokolin, who opened a liquor store on Madison Avenue after Prohibition ended (and was said to have been granted New York State license No. 4), and the former Lillian Isacoff.

Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor

Wash Post obit: Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor
Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.

Mr. Bradlee loved the Watergate story, not least because it gave the newspaper “impact,” his favorite word in his first years as editor. He wanted the paper to be noticed. In his personal vernacular — a vivid, blasphemous argot that combined the swearwords he mastered in the Navy during World War II with the impeccable enunciation of a blue-blooded Bostonian — a great story was “a real tube-ripper.” This meant a story was so hot that Post readers would rip the paper out of the tubes into which the paperboy delivered it. A bad story was “mego” — the acronym for “my eyes glaze over” — applied to anything that bored him. Maximizing the number of tube-rippers and minimizing mego was the Bradlee strategy.

Although he graduated from St. Mark’s School and Harvard University, the Navy left as much of a mark on Mr. Bradlee as did his early life among Boston’s WASP aristocracy. The Navy taught him to swear, as well as to respect talent wherever it appeared.


NY Times obit: Ben Bradlee, Editor Who Directed Watergate Coverage

Ben Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post’s Watergate reporting that led to the fall of President Richard M. Nixon and that stamped him in American culture as the quintessential newspaper editor of his era — gruff, charming and tenacious — died on Tuesday. He was 93.

When the trail of crimes and shenanigans led directly to the White House, Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974. The tapes that he himself had made of conversations in the Oval Office confirmed what The Post had been reporting. Mrs. Graham wrote to Mr. Bradlee in her Christmas letter that year, “We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it.”

In their book, describing meetings in Mr. Bradlee’s office, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein recalled how Mr. Bradlee would pick up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball and toss it at a small hoop attached to a window. “The gesture was indicative both of the editor’s short attention span and of a studied informality,” they wrote. “There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee.”

They observed that double-edged manner in Washington society, sometimes seeing it displayed in one swoop, as when Mr. Bradlee would “grind his cigarettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party.” “Bradlee,” they added, “was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.”

 

William Greaves, a Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist

The AP obit takes a slightly different track than the Times's obit.

William Greaves, the Emmy-award winning co-host and executive producer of a groundbreaking television news program and a prolific filmmaker whose subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali to the Harlem Renaissance to the black middle class, has died at age 87.

Greaves died Monday at his Manhattan home after a prolonged illness, according to his granddaughter, Liani Greaves.

A minister's son born in New York City, Greaves had a diverse background that included drawing, acting, dance and engineering. He leaves behind a vast film archive of black art and culture

William Greaves making his experimental and long-neglected 1968 film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.” Credit John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive — Getty Images

 

Mr. Greaves was well known for his work as a documentarian focusing on racial issues and black historical figures. In his later years he was equally known for his most uncharacteristic film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.” Made in 1968, it mixed fact and fiction in a complex film-within-a-film structure that made it a tough sell commercially, and it waited almost four decades for theatrical release. When it finally had one, in 2005, it was warmly praised as ahead of its time.

Mr. Greaves (rhymes with “leaves”) gained national recognition as a co-host and later executive producer of “Black Journal,” a monthly hourlong National Educational Television newsmagazine that made its debut in 1968 in response to a call by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to expand coverage of black affairs. It was the only nationally telecast series devoted to black issues in the 1960s.

William Greaves, 2nd right, Don Fellows and Patricia Ree Gilbert filming "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One." Credit Jerry Pantzer

“By the acid test of professional and perceptive journalism, ‘Black Journal’ has earned its rightful niche as a continuing and absorbing feature of television’s output,” the television critic Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times in 1969. “Mr. Greaves is simply covering a story that should be covered and covering it with distinction.”

In 1970, “Black Journal” won an Emmy in the “magazine-type programming” category.

Later that year, Mr. Greaves left the program to pursue projects developed by his own production company. (He was replaced by Tony Brown, and the program was later renamed “Tony Brown’s Journal.”)

 Tony Brown's Journal I know.

In his later years, when asked about his achievements as a chronicler of black history and black life, Mr. Greaves was proud but modest. “I thought I was going to be a hurricane, but I ended up a becoming merely a single raindrop,” he once said. “Hopefully there are other raindrops of similar mind.”

Thomas Berger, ‘Little Big Man’ Author

Thomas Berger, the reclusive and bitingly satirical novelist who explored the myths of the American West in “Little Big Man” and the mores of 20th-century middle-class society in a shelf of other well-received books, died on July 13 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 89.

His agent, Cristina Concepcion, said she learned of his death, at Nyack Hospital, on Monday. Mr. Berger lived in Grand View, a village in Rockland County, N.Y., where he had remained fiercely protective of his privacy.

Mr. Berger fell into that category of novelists whose work is admired by critics, devoured by devoted readers and even assigned in modern American literature classes but who owe much of their popularity to Hollywood. “Little Big Man,” published in 1964, is widely known for Arthur Penn’s film adaptation, released in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman as the protagonist, Jack Crabb.

The novel, told in Crabb’s voice at the age of 111, recounts his life on the Great Plains as an adopted Cheyenne and makes the claim that he was the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But Mr. Berger’s body of work was far broader than that, and it earned him a reputation as an American original, if an underrecognized one. The author and scholar Thomas R. Edwards, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1980, called him “one of our most intelligent, witty and independent-minded writers.” “Our failure to read and discuss him,” Mr. Edwards added, “is a national disgrace.”

Photo

Dustin Hoffman in “Little Big Man” (1970), based on Mr. Berger’s novel about a survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Credit MPI, via Getty Images

To many critics, “Little Big Man” was Mr. Berger’s best novel and a worthy addition to the American canon. (The Dial Press plans a 50th-anniversary trade paperback edition this year.) “Few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much fiber and blood of the national experience in them,” the historian and novelist Frederick Turner wrote in The Nation in 1977.

Brooks Landon, Mr. Berger’s biographer, placed “Little Big Man” in a tradition of American frontier literature begun by James Fenimore Cooper. Henry Miller heard echoes of Mark Twain in it.

James M. Burns, a Scholar of Presidents and Leadership

James MacGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and political scientist who wrote voluminously about the nature of leadership in general and the presidency in particular, died on Tuesday at his home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 95. The historian Michael Beschloss, a friend and former student, confirmed the death.

Mr. Burns, who taught at Williams College for most of the last half of the 20th century, was the author of more than 20 books, most notably “Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom” (1970), a major study of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stewardship of the country through World War II. It was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

An informal adviser to presidents, Mr. Burns was a liberal Democrat who once ran for Congress from the westernmost district of Massachusetts. Though he sometimes wrote prescriptively from — or for — the left, over all he managed the neat trick of neither hiding his political viewpoint in his work nor funneling his work through it. His work was often critical of American government and its system of checks and balances, which in his view was an obstacle to visionary progress, particularly as a rein on the presidency. In works like “The Deadlock of Democracy” (1963) and “Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court” (2009), he argued for systemic changes, calling for a population-based Senate, term limits for Supreme Court justices and an end to midterm elections.

In 1978, after a half-dozen more books, including the second Roosevelt volume and separate studies of the presidency and of state and local governments, Mr. Burns wrote “Leadership,” an amalgamation of a lifetime of thinking about the qualities shared and exemplified by world leaders throughout history. It became a standard academic text in the emerging discipline known as leadership studies, and Mr. Burns’s concept of transforming leadership itself became the subject of hundreds of doctoral theses.

Asked to describe Mr. Burns’s passions away from his writing, Ms. Sorenson named skiing, his two golden retrievers, Jefferson and Roosevelt, the blueberry patch in his yard and his students.

“He would never bump a student appointment to meet with someone more important,” Ms. Sorenson said. “I remember Hillary Clinton once inviting him to tea, and he wouldn’t go because he had to meet with a student. And he would never leave his place in Williamstown during blueberry season.”

John Eisenhower, Military Historian and Son of the President

A Peninsula Library patron, with who I have developed a friendship, in part based on a shared interest in history, told me about JSE's passing (I'd already seen the item). Then he mentioned that John graduated from West Point on 4 June 1944 — D-Day, the day his father sent Allied troops to invade Europe, to land in Normandy in the beginning of the campaign to dislodge the Nazis.

Leslie Priest/Associated Press — John Eisenhower and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower visiting Culzean Castle in Scotland in 1946.

 Mr. Eisenhower was an Army officer in World War II and the Korean War and a national security adviser during his father’s presidency, but at that point he was still viewed primarily as the son of Ike, the American hero. 

National security adviser; fascinating.

John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower was born in Denver while his father was stationed at an Army post in Panama. As a child, he toured World War I battle sites with his father, who was writing an Army guidebook to them. He attended high school in the Philippines during his father’s tour there and followed his path by entering West Point in July 1941.

But, as he recalled in his memoir, “I was not only his son; I was a young lieutenant who needed on occasion to be straightened out.” At one point, he wrote, “I asked him in all earnestness: ‘If we should meet an officer who ranks above me but below you, how do we handle this? Should I salute first and when they return my salute, do you return theirs?’ “Dad’s annoyed reaction was short. ‘John, there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me.’ ” 

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury died Wednesday in Los Angeles, his biographer has confirmed. He was 91. The science-fiction author was born in Illinois, a descendant of Mary Bradbury, a woman who was tried and hanged as a witch in the Salem witch trials. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947, and a chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore put him in touch with respected critic Charles Isherwood, who then gave a glowing review to The Martian Chronicles. Three years later, Bradbury became a household name with the publication of Fahrenheit 451, the story of a book-burning future. The author of 11 novels, Bradbury also published numerous short-story collections, plays, screenplays, and graphic novels. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

 Among the many things being said about Bradbury, that is a surprise to me: that he was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, a woman who was tried and hanged as a witch in the Salem witch trials.

Green-Wood after dark

Benjamin Norman for The Wall Street Journal - Green-Wood Cemetery’s catacombs, which date back to the early 1850s, will be open to visitors during Saturday’s moonlight tour. More photos from inside cemetery.

Green-Wood was founded in 1838 as the graveyards of Manhattan were filling up. It quickly became one of the city’s top draws for tourists, until a rule instituted in the 1960s limited entry to plot owners or those visiting specific graves. Those restrictions were lifted in 1999, and visitors returned in droves. Now 200,000 people come to Green-Wood each year, lured by the famous figures resting within its grounds, including Leonard Bernstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I've been there myself, in fact; some years ago.

Moonlight tours and other creative ventures provide much-needed cash for Green-Wood, but the fund-raising ideas aren’t always successful. The moonlight tours have been less divisive and consistently popular, drawing up to 250 people with the unusual mix of tombstones and tunes. “We have two accordionists that come with it. They play ‘Blue Moon’ and other appropriate tunes for a moonlight tour,” Richman said.