Ride, Sally, ride

Sally Ride: 1951-2012:American Woman Who Shattered Space Ceiling

Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978 after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984. At 32, she was also the youngest American in space. She later became the only person to sit on both panels investigating the catastrophic shuttle accidents that killed all astronauts on board — the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia crash in 2003.

Dr. Ride was finishing studies at Stanford University — she had degrees in physics and astrophysics (and also English) — and looking for a job when she saw NASA’s advertisement. She looked at the qualifications and said, “I’m one of those people,” she told The New York Times in 1982. She applied, and made the cut. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said.

How many other astronauts have degrees in English?

She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers. 

Dr. Ride told interviewers that what drove her was not the desire to become famous or to make history as the first woman in space. All she wanted to do was fly, she said, to soar into space, float around weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and gaze back at Earth. In photographs of her afloat in the spaceship, she was grinning, as if she had at long last reached the place she was meant to be.

Ride, Sally, ride.

Condom Judge

A Hewlett patron asked me for help in copying this obit. I did so, but the edge was cut off, so I walked back to this computer and printed it. After passing over the printout, I started to read the obit. Fascinating.

Justice Gustin L. Reichbach, who went from the carefree fraternity life to leading student protests at Columbia University in 1968 and then to a career as a fiercely independent lawyer and judge, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 65. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Ellen Meyers, said.

 Across six decades of myriad public incarnations, Justice Reichbach occupied buildings at Columbia as a student, won a court case that helped legalize residential loft life in SoHo and TriBeCa, blasted a state agency from the bench for ignoring Medicaid fraud and served as a judge on a war-crimes tribunal in Kosovo.

Elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1999, he decorated his courtroom with pictures of Paul Robeson, Clarence Darrow and striking coal miners, as well as a neon sign showing the scales of justice.

Justice Reichbach was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 9, 1946, and grew up in Flatbush, one of two sons of a machinist who organized unions. After graduating from Midwood High School, he attended the State University at Buffalo, where he was the president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. As the Vietnam War was escalating, the arrival of an R.O.T.C. military recruiting office on campus awoke a radical spirit in Mr. Reichbach, said Daniel L. Alterman, a friend who attended Buffalo with him.

 His engagement with radical politics gathered force when he was admitted to Columbia University School of Law. A classmate, Bruce Ratner, now a real estate developer, recalled meeting him as they stood in line to pay tuition in September 1967. “This guy with long blond curly hair, almost white, started talking to me with a Brooklyn accent that sounded like it was right out of ‘On the Waterfront’ and asked me if I’d found a place to stay,” Mr. Ratner said. By the time they reached the front of the line, Mr. Ratner invited him to crash in his apartment on 103rd Street. 

In court, Justice Reichbach wore robes only on sentencing days. A white scarf usually accented his three-piece suits, along with a Phi Beta Kappa key from his undergraduate days. His curly mane lost none of its exuberance as it grayed. 

Iconoclastic head of Brooklyn school

As the founding headmaster of Saint Ann’s, Mr. Bosworth envisioned an academically rigorous school for the gifted, from pre-school through high school, with no grades and few rules. Along with standard courses like Shakespeare and Chinese, there are puppetry classes. For years, the school had a smoking lounge for students. Its own literature calls the place an “amusement park” whose attractions were Aristophanes, Darwin and Baudelaire.

Why no grades? “How do you give a grade on an oboe’s sweet, beautiful sound?” Mr. Bosworth said in an interview with New York magazine in 2004 after announcing he would retire at 76. That article, titled “The Devil and Saint Ann’s,” illustrated Mr. Bosworth’s penchant for pungent, provocative commentary. In it, he told parents not to worry about students sleeping together. “If they’re affectionate, they’re affectionate!” he said.


Mr. Bosworth could be paradoxical in a single phrase, as when he said he was really the person he pretended to be. But when asked if he found anything satisfying about getting older, he was unmistakably straightforward. “I have the satisfaction of seeing people I hate die!” he said.

Taught at school for gays

Mark Peterson/Redux - Fred Goldhaber and Monica Fishof in 1991, then the Havey Milk School’s only full-time teachers.


Among Mr. G.’s first students back in 1985 were runaways who had been sleeping in a shed down by the docks in Lower Manhattan where the city stored mountains of road salt. One boy had hitchhiked from Ohio after eight teenagers dragged him into a bathroom at school, bashed his head against a toilet and burned his arm with a cigarette lighter. Another boy, from New York City, had been abused by his parents after a teacher told them he was “acting like a faggot.” He was kept at home for a year — chained to a radiator, beaten and taken by his father to 42nd Street and forced to have sex with men for money. His father went to prison.


There is no way to know how many of the gay and lesbian youngsters who came under the wing of Mr. G., as he was known, went on to graduate from high school or just found the strength to make their way in the world. But for dozens, at least, he was a hero. Mr. G. — Fred Goldhaber, the first and, for four years, the only teacher at the Harvey Milk School in Manhattan, the first school in the country with a mission to provide a haven for gay and lesbian students, died of liver cancer on Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 63.

He had lived with AIDS for nearly 30 years, said his brother, Richard.


The Harvey Milk School, named for the gay-rights advocate and San Francisco city supervisor who was killed in 1978, was established in 1985 by what was then called the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth (now the Hetrick-Martin Institute), with financial support from the city’s Board of Education. Mr. Goldhaber, who had taught English and remedial reading at Wingate High School in Brooklyn for 17 years, volunteered to teach the incoming class of 22 students, who first gathered in April 1985 at a church in Greenwich Village. The school later moved to a building at 2 Astor Place.

Back then it was like an old-time country school, with Mr. G. juggling academic demands: answering questions about physics, correcting spelling tests, going over verb conjugation, keeping an eye out for the girl slumping into sleep. A longtime member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, he laced lessons with song snippets: “Teach me tonight” while assigning homework; “Call me irresponsible” to a girl who had not done her math.

“At his right hand,” Time magazine wrote in 1989, “Goldhaber pores over pictures with one student, saying, ‘Yes, this is an ion, but is it just an ion or a hydroxide ion? Think about it.’ He asks the student on his left, ‘Do you really believe 20 times 15 is 30,000?’ ”


Until 2003, the school was actually what the Department of Education classifies as a transfer program, meaning students could earn graduate equivalency diplomas or enough credits to graduate from the school they had left. Now they can graduate directly from the Milk School. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, said about 100 students are enrolled at the Milk School each year, about one-third of whom graduate within four years — a reflection of the difficulties they face. Stephen Phillips, a professor of education at Brooklyn College who was the city’s superintendent of alternative high schools and programs when the Milk School opened, observed Mr. Goldhaber in action.

“The kids idolized him,” Mr. Phillips said. “Many of them never would have gotten diplomas had it not been for the way he treated them.”

When his brother walked the city’s streets, Richard Goldhaber said, “time after time” students “would stop him, hug him and thank him for rescuing them.” Fred Martin Goldhaber was born in Brooklyn on April 23, 1947. His father, Max, was a lawyer; his mother, the former Betty Chatow, was a concert pianist. He received a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1968 and a master’s degree there a year later, both in education. Besides his brother, Mr. Goldhaber is survived by his companion, Wilfredo Hinds.


When the school celebrated its sixth anniversary in 1991, a student asked, “Will the school survive?” To which Mr. G. replied, “If you kids do.” Another student said: “I hope there will be a day when there is no gay school. Because, you know, there shouldn’t have to be one.”

November 15, 2010: Fred Goldhaber, 63, Dies; Taught at School for Gays. By DENNIS HEVESI

Go-to guy

Theodore W. Kheel, who was New York City’s pre-eminent labor peacemaker from the 1950s through the 1980s, a mediator and arbitrator sought after by both City Hall and the White House to help avert or end strikes of crippling consequence, died on Friday. He was 96 and lived in Manhattan. Mr. Kheel, who played a pivotal role in ending newspaper, teacher and subway strikes in New York, was the go-to guy for mayors, labor leaders and business executives during the post-World War II era, when unions were far more powerful than they are now and a savvy, respected ringmaster was often needed to pressure and cajole all sides to reach a settlement.

Settled the teachers strike when I was in high school.

Even though Mr. Kheel handled disputes for bakers, garbage collectors, plumbers, subway conductors, tugboat captains and undertakers, he was an unabashed bon vivant, fond of fast sports cars and fine food. He once owned a stake in Le Pavillon, a leading French restaurant in Manhattan, and leased wine bin No. 1 at both the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World. He also represented numerous artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Christo. Mr. Kheel juggled enough obligations to keep a half-dozen people busy — he served as chairman of Republic National Bank, he was president of the National Urban League from 1956 to 1960, and he wrote a 10-volume treatise on labor law. He also made millions of dollars as an entrepreneur; he was the lead investor in the giant Punta Cana resort, built along 30 miles of jungle in the Dominican Republic, and chairman of a company that distributed MasterCards to more than 1.4 million union members.


During his more than half a century of involvement in labor matters, Mr. Kheel was known above all else for his extraordinary ability to get feuding parties to make concessions to reach an agreement. His efforts included helping coordinate bargainers and mediators during the 35-day New York City teachers’ strike in 1968.


Over the decades, Mr. Kheel helped mediate more than a dozen transit contracts and helped end the 12-day transit strike of 1966. 

Another one I remember.

John W. Kluge

John W. Kluge, who parlayed a small fortune from a Fritos franchise into a multibillion-dollar communications empire that made him one of the richest men in America, died on Tuesday night at a family home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 95. The John W. Kluge Foundation confirmed his death. Mr. Kluge was the creator of Metromedia, the nation’s first major independent broadcasting entity, a conglomerate that grew to include seven television stations, 14 radio stations, outdoor advertising, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Ice Capades, radio paging and mobile telephones.

Channel 5 in NYC, now, alas, part of Murdoch's empire, was a Metromedia station.

An immigrant from Germany, Mr. Kluge (pronounced KLOOG-ee) came to the United States in 1922 and took his first job at the age of 10 as a payroll clerk for his stepfather in Detroit. He made his first million by the time he was 37.

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press-Mr. Kluge in 2007, at the announcement of his $400 million gift to Columbia University.


He made his first billion — it was actually almost two billion — in 1984, when he took Metromedia private in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout and then liquidated the company, more than tripling his take. He sold the television stations, including WNEW in New York, for more than $2 billion to Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his communications empire. Mr. Kluge’s sale of 11 radio stations brought close to $290 million. The outdoor advertising business went for $710 million. The Harlem Globetrotters and the Ice Capades, which together cost the company $6 million, brought $30 million.

Critics complained that he had reaped the bonanza after having paid Metromedia’s stockholders too little when he took the company private. But Mr. Kluge maintained that the value of the company shot up afterward, when the Federal Communications Commission increased the number of television stations a company could own from seven to 12 and ruled that only two cellular telephone systems could operate in a given city.

“That changed the price of poker,” he said.

Associated Press-John Beckett, left, Transamerica’s president, with Mr. Kluge in 1968 at the announcement of a merger that was later called off. 


In 1986, Forbes magazine listed Mr. Kluge as the second-richest man in America (after Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores). By this year, after a bankruptcy of the Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale restaurant chains in 2008, Mr. Kluge had dropped to 109th on the Forbes list with a fortune of $6.5 billion. Mr. Kluge savored the chance to move into new areas of high technology. He had no patience for those he called “self-important corporation types cut out of the same cookie cutter” who tended to stick to what was safe. He often took Wall Street by surprise, but as the financial analyst Allen J. Gottesman said in 1986: “Whatever he does works out real well. You always assume there was a good reason, and you usually find out later that it was a good move.” Not everything he touched turned to gold. In 1965 he bought Diplomat magazine in Washington and tried to change it from a society sheet into a serious publication of world affairs. “I lost a million dollars before I ever knew I lost it,” he said. Three years later he negotiated a proposed $300 million merger of Metromedia with Transamerica only to join in calling off the deal “by mutual consent” in a two-paragraph statement months later, saying a merger would “adversely effect” the growth plans of both companies.

But he never lost his zest for developing new businesses or his taste for complex financial deals. “I love the work because it taxes your mind,” he said in an interview for this obituary, one of the few he ever gave, after he turned 72. “Years ago, I could have taken a few million dollars and joined the country club and gotten into this pattern of complaining about the world and about the tax law.” He was critical of corporation executives who put themselves in the limelight. There were no public relations officers on his payroll. He liked to do business behind an unmarked door. “I think a great deal of publicity becomes an obstacle,” he said. “I’d love to be in the woodwork all my life. I enjoy it when I know who the other people are and they don’t know who I am.”


But it was inevitable that people would come to know who he was, first in the business world as the man with the Midas touch and then as a generous contributor to schools and hospitals. In his later years his name appeared in the society columns as the host for charity parties that he and his third wife, Patricia, gave on their yacht, the Virginian, or as a guest at dinner dances. (He had taught dancing at an Arthur Murray studio when he was in college.) He grew flowers and collected paintings, African sculpture and Indian, Chinese, Greek and Egyptian objets d’art. But nothing gave him more pleasure than putting a deal together. And the creation of Metromedia, considered a triumph of financial structuring, may have been his greatest pleasure of all.


The most satisfying day in his life, he said, was the day Barney Balaban of Paramount told him, “Young man, you bring me $4 million and you’ll be able to have the Paramount stock in the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company.” With that $4 million, Mr. Kluge got into the television business as chief executive of Metropolitan, which consisted of two stations — WNEW and, in Washington, WTTG — and two radio stations. He renamed the company Metromedia in 1961 because he intended to expand it beyond broadcasting. Mr. Kluge held to a simple maxim: make money and minimize taxes. He made it his business to study the tax code. In 1981, for example, he received tax benefits when he bought buses and subway cars from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and leased them back to the authority for a tax savings of $50 million over five years. He also found a way to enhance the company’s revenue by marrying the profits of broadcasting to the depreciation that came with billboard advertising.

“I sold the banks the idea that the Ford Motor Company that advertises on radio and television would also advertise on billboards,” he recalled. “From a financial orientation, if you took the pretax profits of radio and television and the depreciation of outdoor advertising, you increase the cash flow. I impressed the bank so much that I borrowed $14 million and got our money back in 27 months.”


John Werner Kluge was born Sept. 21, 1914, in Chemnitz, Germany. His father died in World War I. After his mother remarried, John was brought to America by his German-American stepfather to live in Detroit. The stepfather, Oswald Leitert, put him to work as a boy in the family contracting business. Mr. Kluge said he left home when he was 14 to live in the house of a schoolteacher. “I was driven to have an education.”

He worked hard, and successfully, to lose his foreign accent and to get the grades he needed in high school to win a scholarship to college. He first attended Detroit City College, which was later renamed Wayne State University, and transferred to Columbia University when he was offered a full scholarship and living expenses. At college he distributed Communist literature. “I was never an official member of the Communist Party, but I was quite liberal,” he said many years later. But what got him in trouble was his card playing. At one point the dean called him in to warn that he was in danger of losing his scholarship.


“I told him, ‘Dean, you will never catch me gambling again,’ ” he later recalled, “and it was then that I realized the dean of Columbia University didn’t understand the English language. I had told him he’d never catch me gambling again.”


Mr. Kluge later channeled his fondness for gambling into high-stakes finance. “I don’t really get comfortable when I haven’t got something at risk,” he said. Even as a billionaire twice over, he borrowed money to leverage his next ventures. Mr. Kluge graduated from Columbia in 1937 and went to work for a small paper company in Detroit. Within three years he went from shipping clerk to vice president and part owner. After serving in Army intelligence in World War II, he turned to broadcasting and, with a partner, created the radio station WGAY in Silver Spring, Md., in 1946. “It cost us $90,000,” he recalled. “I went up and down the street on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring to get investors.”


In the 1950s he acquired radio stations in St. Louis, Dallas, Fort Worth, Buffalo, Tulsa, Nashville, Pittsburgh and Orlando, Fla. Meanwhile, he invested in real estate and expanded the New England Fritos corporation, which he had founded in 1947 to distribute Fritos and Cheetos in the Northeast, adding Fleischmann’s yeast, Blue Bonnet margarine and Wrigley’s chewing gum to his distribution network. In 1951 he formed a food brokerage company, expanding it in 1956 in a partnership with David Finkelstein, and augmented his fortune selling the products of companies like General Foods and Coca-Cola to supermarket chains.


Mr. Kluge served on the boards of numerous companies, including Occidental Petroleum, Orion Pictures, Conair and the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, as well as many charitable groups, including United Cerebral Palsy. His philanthropy was prodigious. About a half-billion dollars went to Columbia alone, mainly for scholarships for needy and minority students. One gift, of $400 million, was to be given to the university by his estate when he died. Mr. Kluge also contributed to the restoration of Ellis Island and in 2000 gave $73 million to the Library of Congress, which established the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities.


Mr. Kluge and his third wife, the former Patricia Rose Gay, lived in a Georgian-style house on a 6,000-acre farm near Charlottesville called Albemarle House. He had another home in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Long Island Sound, and an apartment in Manhattan, where he kept much of his modern art collection, including works by Giacometti, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Fernando Botero. He traveled to his houses in his plane and helicopter. Mr. Kluge became acquainted with the woman who would become his third wife at parties when she was in her mid-20s and he was about 60. “At one party,” he said, “she cooked the dinner and then she did a belly dance on the table and I said to myself, ‘Where have I been all my life?’ ”


A small scandal erupted in 1985 when Mrs. Kluge was chairwoman of a charity ball in Palm Beach, Fla., attended by Charles and Diana, the prince and princess of Wales. The British press disclosed that a nude photograph of Mrs. Kluge had been published a decade before in a British magazine called Knave, which was owned by her first husband. To avoid embarrassment, the Kluges were traveling abroad on the night of the ball. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1991, and Mrs. Kluge received a big settlement as well as the Virginia estate. He married again, to Maria Tussi Kuttner, who survives him. Mr. Kluge is also survived by his son, John W. Kluge II; a daughter, Samantha Kluge, from his second marriage, to Yolanda Galardo Zucco; a stepson, Joseph Brad Kluge, whom he adopted; and a grandson. His first wife was Theodora Thomson Townsend. A convert to Roman Catholicism when he married his third wife, Mr. Kluge said he often went to church. He had planned to be buried in a crypt in a chapel he built on the grounds of Albemarle, but later changed his mind after the house was awarded to his third wife in the divorce.

Mr. Kluge acknowledged that he had been ruled by his ambitions and traced them to the struggles of his boyhood. He recalled a conversation he had with friends in college about their aspirations. “One fellow said he wanted to be a lawyer, another a doctor,” he said. “I said one thing — that the only reason I wanted money was that I was always afraid of being a charity case and of being a ward someplace. That’s what really drove me all my life.”


September 8, 2010
John W. Kluge, Founder of Metromedia, Dies at 95
By MARILYN BERGER

Nathan Quiñones

Vic DeLucia/The New York Times - Nathan Quinones in 1985. 

July 27, 2010
Nathan Quiñones Dies at 79; Led New York City Schools
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Nathan Quiñones, who as the chancellor of the New York City school system in the mid-1980s pushed to reduce dropout rates and institute tougher achievement standards but who resigned six months before the end of his term in the face of public pressure, died Sunday in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 79. The cause was a stroke, his daughter Adria Quiñones said.

Mr. Quiñones had been a language teacher, principal and administrator for 27 years in the city school system when he became chancellor in 1984. He succeeded Anthony J. Alvarado, who resigned because of financial irregularities after serving one year. Mr. Quiñones served three and a half years.

Under Mr. Quiñones, test scores somewhat improved, overcrowding in classrooms eased and, by some measures, the dropout rate fell. He started a program to teach students about racism and established, in Lower Manhattan, the Harvey Milk High School, which was intended to be sensitive to the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. He closed a junior high school in the Bronx for unacceptable attendance and achievements.

Mr. Quiñones (pronounced key-NYO-nas) announced his resignation in August 1987, effective Jan. 1, 1988, six months before his contract expired. Early in his tenure, he was criticized as politically clumsy in lobbying for bigger school budgets. Later, business leaders complained that high school graduates were not well educated for the workplace.

Many criticized Mr. Quiñones as not being sufficiently adroit at working with the Board of Education, which oversaw education in the city then, and as ineffective in slicing through the school bureaucracy. (The schools are now controlled by the mayor.)

During her campaign for mayor in 1985, the City Council president, Carol Bellamy, demanded his ouster, saying Mr. Quiñones had “consistently failed to provide the leadership or sound management we need.”

Mayor Edward I. Koch contended that Mr. Quiñones’s low-key manner had hurt him politically.

“I think we’re losing a first-rate chancellor,” Mr. Koch said in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. “He has a very sedate kind of style. He’s not a pushy guy. But he’s a very courageous man, and he is very intelligent, very experienced. I think he was on the right track. I only regret that others were not supportive of him.”

Mr. Quiñones was born in East Harlem on Oct. 12, 1930, to Puerto Rican parents who had to rely on public assistance in the 1940s. While attending City College, where he majored in classical and romance languages, he worked six nights a week at a hospital. He graduated in 1953. After serving in the Army in Korea, he got a master’s degree from Columbia University.

Mr. Quiñones joined the school system as a foreign-language teacher in 1957 and was assistant principal in charge of foreign languages at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens when he was named principal of South Bronx High School in 1977. Frank J. Macchiarola, the chancellor before Mr. Alvarado, appointed him chief of the city’s high schools, ahead of many more experienced principals.

In addition to his daughter, Adria, Mr. Quiñones is survived by his wife, the former Romana Martinez; two other daughters, Daria Quiñones and Cyra Borsy; and three grandchildren.

In an interview with Newsday in 1988, Mr. Quiñones said he felt so relieved when he resigned that he found himself singing as he walked down the street.

“I felt like a little bird,” he said. “I was amused. I never sing.”

Jaime Escalante, Inspiration for a Movie

Warner Brothers, via Associated Press - Jaime Escalante, right, and the actor who portrayed him in the 1988 hit movie “Stand and Deliver,” Edward James Olmos.

March 31, 2010
Jaime Escalante, Inspiration for a Movie, Dies at 79
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Jaime Escalante, the high school teacher whose ability to turn out high-achieving calculus students from a poor Hispanic neighborhood in East Los Angeles inspired the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver,” with Edward James Olmos in the starring role, died Tuesday at his son’s home in Rosedale, Calif. He was 79 and lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The cause was pulmonary arrest brought on by pneumonia, his son Jaime said.

Mr. Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant, used unconventional techniques to explain mathematical problems and to convince his students at James A. Garfield High School, known for its dismal test scores and high drop-out rate, that they could compete with students from wealthier schools. Rock ’n’ roll records played at full blast, remote-controlled toys and magic tricks were all brought into play.

“Calculus need not be made easy,” read one of the motivational signs in Mr. Escalante’s classroom. “It is easy already.”

In 1982, 18 students in the special calculus program that Mr. Escalante had created at Garfield four years earlier took the College Board’s advanced placement test in calculus. Seven of them received a 5, the highest possible score; the rest, a 4.

Officials at the company administering the test suspected cheating and asked 14 students to take the exam again. A dozen did, and their performance validated the original results.

Mr. Olmos’s performance in “Stand and Deliver” earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor and turned Mr. Escalante into an educational hero. The year of the film, Henry Holt published “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” by Jay Mathews.

“He was working with a group of students who did not have much in life,” said Erika T. Camacho, who took algebra with Mr. Escalante and now teaches mathematics at Arizona State University. “They were told that they were not good enough and would not amount to much. He told them that with desire and discipline, they could do anything.”

Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutiérrez was born on Dec. 31, 1930, in La Paz, where his parents were elementary school teachers. He taught physics and mathematics there for several years before political unrest led him to emigrate with his family to the United States in 1963.

In addition to his son Jaime, Mr. Escalante is survived by his wife, Fabiola, another son, Fernando, of Elk Grove, Calif., and six grandchildren.

While attending Pasadena College, where he earned an associate degree in arts in 1969, Mr. Escalante worked as a busboy in a coffee shop and as a cook. He later found work testing computers at the Burroughs Corporation while studying mathematics at California State University in Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1973.

After receiving his teacher’s certificate from Cal State in 1974, he began teaching at Garfield. The events telescoped into a single year in “Stand and Deliver” unfolded over a much longer time. Beginning with five calculus students in 1978, Mr. Escalante developed a program that eventually attracted hundreds of students keen to go on to college. In 1988, 443 students took the College Board’s advanced placement test; 266 passed.

Success, acclaim and the celebrity status that came with “Stand and Deliver” brought strife. Mr. Escalante butted heads with the school’s administration and fellow teachers, some jealous of his fame, others worried that he was creating his own fief. The teacher’s union demanded that his oversubscribed calculus classes be brought down in size.

In 1991, Mr. Escalante left Garfield to teach at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento. Without him, Garfield’s calculus program withered. In 2001 he retired and returned to Bolivia.

Mr. Escalante always impressed on his students the importance of “ganas” — desire. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he once told his class. “I’ll teach you math, and that’s your language. You’re going to go to college and sit in the first row, not in the back, because you’re going to know more than anybody.”

Jamaican Scholar and Educator

February 18, 2010
Rex Nettleford, Jamaican Scholar and Educator, Dies at 76
By ROB KENNER

Rex Nettleford, a Jamaican scholar, educator and choreographer who devoted his life to studying postcolonial Caribbean culture and in the process helped shape it, died in Washington on Feb. 2, one day before his 77th birthday. The cause was catastrophic brain injury following cardiac arrest, Dr. Christopher Junker of the George Washington University Hospital said.

Mr. Nettleford was in Washington to participate in a meeting of experts charged by the United Nations with monitoring the state of racial discrimination around the world. He had been expected in New York for a Jan. 28 fund-raising event for the University of the West Indies, where he had worked for over half a century.

Although he was a trusted adviser to political leaders throughout the Caribbean and the driving force behind the University of the West Indies’ extramural studies department, which widened the institution’s reach by offering educational opportunities to the general population, Mr. Nettleford is perhaps best known as a founder of the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica, which was established in 1962, the same year Jamaica gained independence from Britain. Incorporating traditional West Indian music and dance forms like kumina, ska and reggae, Mr. Nettleford served as the choreographer and even in his later years remained a lead dancer of the troupe, which still tours internationally, exploring the unique blend of African and European influences that comprises Caribbean culture.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding of Jamaica called Mr. Nettleford “an intellectual and creative genius” whose “contribution to shaping and projecting the cultural landscape of the entire Caribbean region are unquestionable.”

Raised in the rural town of Falmouth in the parish of Trelawny, where he was born on Feb. 3, 1933, Mr. Nettleford enrolled in the University of the West Indies in Kingston and went on to earn a Rhodes scholarship to study political science at Oxford University. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Rhodes Scholarships in 2003, Mr. Nettleford was one of four alumni presented with honorary degrees. In addition, the Rhodes Trust established the Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies.

Alister McIntyre, a classmate of Mr. Nettleford’s at Oxford whom he eventually succeeded as vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, recalled that Mr. Nettleford had never considered pursuing the opportunities available to him in England: “He had a one-track mind. For him returning to the Caribbean meant everything. He wanted to make contact with the wider population.” To that end, he founded and ran the Trade Union Education Institute, which offered free classes to agricultural and factory workers.

Shortly after returning from Oxford, Mr. Nettleford was chosen by Prime Minister Norman Washington Manley to undertake a serious study of the Rastafari movement, which had taken root in the slums of West Kingston and grown increasingly vocal in demanding repatriation to Africa. While Jamaican society considered the Rastas dangerous outcasts, the groundbreaking report written by Mr. Nettleford and his two colleagues, published in 1961, credited the movement with helping reconnect Jamaica with its African roots, calling it “a revitalizing force, albeit a discomforting and disturbing one.”

Mr. Nettleford’s field research among the Rastas informed his work with the dance troupe as well as his seminal 1969 study of Caribbean identity, “Mirror Mirror.” And his reframing of the Rastafari movement helped pave the way for the worldwide explosion of Rasta-inspired reggae music in the 1970s.

Mr. Nettleford was also influential in Unesco’s Slave Route Project, which studies the centrality of the slave trade in shaping the modern world.

He is survived by a sister.

“He was probably one of the most brilliant African thinkers of the last century,” said his friend and colleague Howard Dodson Jr., director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. “He was looking for ways to use his incredible intellectual gift to empower African people and to come to their defense and protection in a frequently hostile world.”