STEPHANIE SALTER: Good-bye to Molly, Bowie, Luciano, a Funk Brother and so many more

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE December 29, 2007 09:01 pm

— Along with other news traditions, the end of the year brings lists of luminaries who passed from our realm during the previous 12 months. I was lucky to meet a handful of the 2007 departed gang and grateful never to have crossed actual paths with a few others.
This year — with help from the Associated Press and Wikipedia — I offer an ultra-customized in memoriam for some of the human lights that went out in ’07.
Old age and “natural causes” claimed many. Some died in accidents, others from diseases that have a way of taking folks out about 30 years too soon for my tastes.
Two giants of journalism were an example of each of those latter ends. Columnist and human rights champion Molly Ivins, 62, could no longer out-run breast cancer. David Halberstam, 73, author and investigative chronicler of generations, wars and industries, was killed in a car wreck on his way to a speech.
Journalism also lost political humorist Art Buchwald, 81, jazz critic non pareil Whitney Balliett, 80, and economist, novelist, screenwriter and Marketwatch contributor Paul Erdman, 74.
Erdman, with whom I shared some memorable and mighty educational lunches in San Francisco, died on the same day Halberstam was killed, April 23, which also saw the passing of choreographer Michael Smuin, 69. Dec. 23, another great choreographer left, Michael Kidd, 92.
One more veteran newspaper man died this year, but I’ve put him in my sports category.
Jack Lange, 85, covered baseball in New York his entire adult life and served as secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America for 22 years. In 1973, he had me thrown me out of the annual, black-tie BBWAA dinner in Manhattan. Despite my ticket, formal attire and job as a baseball researcher at Sports Illustrated, I was missing a key qualifier in Jack’s book: a Y chromosome.
A few years later, when I was a regular baseball beat writer for the San Francisco Examiner, Jack had no choice but to sign my official BBWAA membership card. It read, “Mr. Stephanie Salter.”
Bowie Kuhn was commissioner of baseball then. He died March 15 (spring training) at 80. In his 15-year reign, Bowie presided over the demise of the reserve clause, a nasty drug scandal, the shenanigans of owner Charles O. Finley, the introduction of night World Series games and women reporters in the locker room.
My former Sports Illustrated colleague, Melissa Ludtke, sued Major League Baseball and won a 1978 federal court decision that benefited all female sports writers. The day the court granted us equal access for clubhouse interviews, I wired a dozen roses to Kuhn’s office in New York with the message, “Here’s to the open door policy.” His secretary phoned to tell me, “The commissioner quite enjoyed your gift.”
One sports figure who did not live to be an old man was Darryl Stingley, 55. A star wide receiver for Purdue and the New England Patriots, Stingley was paralyzed in a pre-season game in 1978 by a deliberately vicious hit from Oakland Raiders defensive safety Jack Tatum.
Stingley spent his last three decades a virtual quadriplegic. But he worked for the Pats, founded a sports program for Chicago youth and had this to say in 2003 to Boston columnist Ron Borges when he learned that Tatum — who never apologized to him — had lost a leg to diabetes:
“… for me to go on and adapt to a new way of life, I had to forgive him. I couldn’t be productive if my mind was clouded by revenge or animosity. Early on there were a lot of questions in my mind. Questions about life in general. Questions if I would even live. But I have such a strong faith in God … In my heart and in my mind I forgave Jack Tatum a long time ago. I take no pleasure in what has happened to him now. How could anyone feel pleasure in another man’s pain?”
Music always seems diminished at the end of each year, and 2007 is no exception. Opera was hit hard with the cancer deaths of Luciano Pavarotti, 71, Beverly Sills, 78, and Regine Crespin, 80. July 18, two weeks after Sills passed, inner demons defeated the wonderful American tenor, Jerry Hadley, who shot himself to death. He was 55.
One of the finest cellists of all time, Mstislav Rostropovich, exited at 80. His two-CD set of Bach cello suites is what I put on when the world is too much with me and my soul needs time out.
Jazz also lost scores of great and good artists, among them the gorgeous drummer Max Roach, 83, saxophonist Cecil Payne, 84, and vocalists Nellie Lutcher, 94, and Dakota Staton, 76. Perhaps the biggest hole was punched out last week by the death of pianist Oscar Peterson, 82. I saw him in-person at least a half-dozen times in his peak years and he never failed to levitate me from my seat.
Rhythm and blues was reduced by dozens, too, including the flawed but electric Ike Turner, 76, and the ground-breaking Motown pianist Joe Hunter, 79.
Hunter led the best band you never heard of, The Funk Brothers, a rotating stable of awesome musicians who turned a bunch of girl and guy singing groups into legends. Influenced by Rachmaninov and Art Tatum, Hunter was the driver on the Contours’ “Do You Love Me?” and Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” among other Detroit-sound hits.
One piece of justice: Hunter lived long enough to be in and view the 2002 documentary tribute to The Funk Brothers, “Standing in the Shadow of Motown.” If you’ve never seen it, remedy the situation immediately via DVD.
If the writers’ strike derails the Academy Awards broadcast, film fans will miss a major review of some departed superstars. Among them, directors Ingmar Bergman, 89, and Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, who, amazingly, died on the same day (July 30), and cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs, 74.
Kovacs’ body of work was deep and diverse, from the gritty, claustrophobic Bob Rafelson classic, “Five Easy Pieces,” to Martin Scorsese’s bigger-than-life musical, “New York, New York.” His footage of Muddy Waters’ set in “The Last Waltz” is film lore.
Among actors, no one ever looked, moved, spoke or conveyed passion simmering just below a proper surface quite the way the exquisite Deborah Kerr did. She was liberated from Parkinson’s at 86. Mioshi Umeki, 78, won an Oscar for “Sayonara,” but her turn as Mei Li in Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song” was sweet perfection.
Legions of TV viewers remember Yvonne DeCarlo, 84, as the matriarch of the Munsters, but she sizzled in 1940s and 1950s movies and commanded the Broadway stage in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.” DeCarlo’s rendition of that show’s survivor-artist anthem, “I’m Still Here,” ranks among the most unforgettable performances I’ve encountered in live theater.
American literature lost some very big boys this year — Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., both 84 — and a big girl, Grace Paley, also 84. All three were social activists in their individual ways, perhaps Paley most overtly.
A college professor as well as a poet, Paley shared her ideal future with an interviewer about four months before her death: “It would be a world without militarism, racism and greed and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”
And on that note of a better world, my final hats-off goes to four people who walked the walk: U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, 69, Indiana’s voice for women, children and common sense; Gordon Zahn, 84, a World War II conscientious objector who co-founded Pax Christi; Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg, 64, who answered the insanity of nuclear proliferation by organizing the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, as well as the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and Maria Julia Hernandez, 68.
A friend and associate of slain Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero, Hernandez devoted three decades of her life to collecting the names and stories of thousands of victims of military death squads in El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.
Her documentation of murders, massacres and “disappearances” took place in the chancery of the Salvadoran Archdiocese and serves as powerful refutation of government denial — ours and El Salvador’s — of human rights abuses. Hernandez and church officials gave new meaning to Christianity’s call to “witness.”
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.