Amiri Baraka

What an irony that he died in Beth Israel Hospital.

Jean Stapleton, Who Played Edith Bunker, Dies

An AP story: Jean Stapleton, the stage-trained character actress who played Archie Bunker's far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TV's groundbreaking 1970s comedy "All in the Family," has died. She was 90.

TheNY Times puits it differently: Stapleton, Archie’s Better Angel, Dies at 90

David F. Smith/Associated Press - Jean Stapleton, left, and Carroll O'Connor held their Emmy awards in 1972 in Hollywood, CA

 Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90.

Richie Havens

NY Times obit — others

Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung.“That’s how I first met Bob Dylan,” Mr. Havens said.

Fred Newman

Fred Newman passed away last week in Manhattan at age 76. Who is Fred Newman? According to his website, "Fred Newman is the public philosopher who for 30 years has translated the most progressive ideals of the 1960s into effective instruments of social and personal transformation," but the NY Times' obituary sums it up more elegantly: "Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description."

Betty Ford

Many obituaries appeared on the death of this historical figure. On reflection, one of the comments that epitomizes her is that no one before her said the things she said ... and no one since, either. No one had, or has, the courage to speak her convictions so candidly.

This slideshow is a brief glimpse into her life.



How Betty Ford's Death Illustrates What Has Been Lost in Our Political Culture

PBS documentary

Augustus Owsley Stanley III

Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph from San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press. - Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley, in 1967. He died Sunday in a car accident in Australia.

Self-taught chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a legend of the 1960s psychedelic underground who produced the LSD that fueled Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” and the Grateful Dead’s acid rock, died March 13 after a car accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had lived since the 1980s. He was 76. Mr. Stanley, the grandson of a Kentucky governor, grew up in the Washington area before he found his calling in Berkeley,­Calif., as an early patron of the Dead and one of the first people to produce mass quantities of acid. “I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007. “Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus. I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places.”

In 1964, an NYT critic writes, a brilliant renegade named Augustus Owsley Stanley III spent three weeks in the university library’s organic chemistry stacks learning the secrets of synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. Before long, Owsley was creating mass quantities of the purest acid the world had ever known, just in time for the seismic cultural and generational transformation of the era.

Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon.


The Washington Post obit has it that, As finicky about audio as he was about acid, he worked for years to develop the Dead’s “wall of sound,” a 40-foot-tall bank of more than 600 speakers whose output could be controlled by the musicians on stage. He plugged in a tape recorder at nearly every one of the Dead’s early sound checks, rehearsals and performances, creating a historical record of the live shows that helped turn the band into a cultural phenomenon. He also helped design the Dead’s widely reproduced skull-and-lightning logo.

His obit in the Australian, Unrepentant chemist of the 60s acid culture, has

Related Coverage

• Grateful Dead manager killed Adelaide Now, 2 days ago
• Counterculture 'LSD Bear' tunes out Courier Mail, 3 days ago
• Psychedelic icon dies in car crash Courier Mail, 3 days ago
• Chemist registers to track drug sales Adelaide Now, 7 days ago
• Police uncover drug lab Herald Sun, 19 Jul 2010

Che's compañero

Javier Galeano/Associated Press - Alberto Granado Jiménez, during an interview in his Havana home with The Associated Press in October 2007.

Alberto Granado Jiménez, the Argentine biochemist who accompanied the young Che Guevara on his formative odyssey across South America, died here on Saturday. He was 88.  Mr. Granado, who settled in Cuba in 1961, died of natural causes, according to Cuban state television. His ashes were to be scattered in Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, a state newscast said.

In December 1951, Mr. Granado and Che set out from Córdoba on Mr. Granado’s overloaded, beat-up motorbike, La Poderosa II, or the powerful one. Their eight-month journey, both a madcap coming-of-age road trip and a journey of political discovery, made a deep impression on both men and set Che on a course that transformed him into a revolutionary icon. The bike, which Mr. Granado said looked like a “huge prehistoric animal,” had endless mechanical problems and made it only as far as Chile. The companions, however, traveled thousands of miles together, scrounging rides and food, and finally parting in Caracas, Venezuela.

Mr. Granado moved to Cuba at Che’s invitation in 1961 and founded the faculty of medicine at the University of Santiago. He later moved to Havana, where he taught and carried out scientific research. Mr. Granado is survived by his wife, Delia María Duque Duque, three children and five grandchildren. He and Che remained friends, and though he openly disputed Che’s conviction that guerrilla warfare was the path to social reform in Latin America, Mr. Granado helped him scout for potential rebels in Argentina in the 1960s, according to a biography by Jon Lee Anderson, “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.”

Before Che left Cuba in 1965 to pursue revolutions abroad, he left several books with inscriptions for close friends. They included one about the sugar industry for Mr. Granado. The inscription was prescient. “My dreams shall know no bounds, at least until bullets decide otherwise,” wrote Che, who was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967. “I’ll be expecting you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder subsides. A hug for all of you. Che.”

3 deaths

Harvey Phillips, a Titan of the Tuba, Dies at 80

Michael Tabor, Black Panther Who Fled to Algeria, Dies at 63

David Thompson, Barbados Prime Minister, Dies at 48