Those we Lost in 2018, continued

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Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy (20 February 1927 – 10 March 2018) – 

French fashion designer who founded the house of Givenchy in 1952. 

Givenchy was famous for having designed much of the personal and professional wardrobe of Audrey Hepburn and clothing for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. 

He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970. 

Hubert de Givenchy died in his sleep at the Renaissance chateau near Paris on Saturday 10 March 2018. He was 91. 

BTW: 

With his perfect manners and old-school discipline, Givenchy had a distinguished presence that colored the fashion industry for over fifty years. A consummate collector with an impeccable eye for objects as well as the interior decoration of houses, he leaves behind a fashion house that defined the very notions of refinement and elegance.  

https://wwd.com/fashion-news/designer-luxury/hubert-de-givenchy-has-died-1202626244/

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Billy Graham (November 7, 1918 – February 21, 2018) – 

American evangelist, a prominent evangelical Christian figure, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister who became well-known internationally in the late 1940s. 

One of his biographers has placed him "among the most influential Christian leaders" of the 20th century. 

As a preacher, he held large indoor and outdoor rallies with sermons broadcast on radio and television; some were still being re-broadcast into the 21st century. In his six decades of television, Graham hosted annual "Crusades", evangelistic campaigns, which ran from 1947 until his retirement in 2005. He also hosted the radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. He repudiated racial segregation and insisted on racial integration for his revivals and crusades, starting in 1953; he also invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York City in 1957. In addition to his religious aims, he helped shape the worldview of a huge number of people who came from different backgrounds, leading them to find a relationship between the Bible and contemporary secular viewpoints. According to his website, Graham preached to live audiences of 210 million people in more than 185 countries and territories through various meetings, including BMS World Mission and Global Mission. 

Graham was a spiritual adviser to U.S. presidents and provided spiritual counsel for every president from the 33rd, Harry S. Truman, to the 44th, Barack Obama. He was particularly close to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson (one of Graham's closest friends), and Richard Nixon. He was also lifelong friends with another televangelist, the founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, whom Graham talked into starting his own television ministry. 

Graham died of natural causes on February 21, 2018, at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, at the age of 99. 

BTW: 

Billy Graham sometimes recounted a story of a time early in his ministry when he arrived in a small town to preach a sermon. Wanting to mail a letter, he asked a young boy where the post office was. When the boy had told him, Dr. Graham thanked him and said, "If you'll come to the Church this evening, you can hear me telling everyone how to get to Heaven."  

"I don't think I'll be there," the boy said. "You don't even know your way to the post office." 

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William Gold (January 3, 1921 – May 20, 2018) – 

American graphic designer. 

Gold is best known for thousands of film poster designs. 

His first film poster was for Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and his final work was for J. Edgar (2011). 

During his 70-year career he worked with some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Laurence Olivier, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Ridley Scott, and many more. Among his most famous film posters are those for Casablanca and A Clockwork Orange. Gold's work spanned eight decades and was involved in the creation of over 2,000 posters. 

Gold died on 20 May 2018, aged 97, at Greenwich Hospital from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. 

BTW: 

After [serving in WW2] Bill returned to Warner Bros and in the late 1950s headed west to LA to work on the Warner lot. That’s where he created advertising campaigns for such movies as Giant, Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, The Searchers and Gypsy. A true New Yorker, Bill came back east a few years later and set up his own shop: Bill Gold Advertising. For 70+ years, Bill Gold truly defined the genre of movie poster advertising. Funny Girl, My Fair Lady, The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, On Golden Pond, Unforgiven, The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon and Mystic River are just a few of the thousands of films he would be associated with. In the late ‘70s Bill began concentrating more on his work with Clint Eastwood. By the mid ‘80s Bill decided to dedicate all his time to Clint. From Dirty Harry to Mystic River, and coming out of retirement to work on J Edgar in 2011, the result has been an amazing and lasting five-decade collaboration between two legends.

http://billgold.net/

Some of his work: 

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Emma Chambers (11 March 1964 – 21 February 2018) – 

English actress. 

Emma Chambers was known for playing the role of Alice Tinker in the BBC comedy The Vicar of Dibley and Honey Thacker in the film Notting Hill (1999). 

On 21 February 2018, Chambers died from natural causes at her home in Lymington. The proximate cause of death was a heart attack. She was 53 years old. 

BTW: 

The beloved star endured a long battle against chronic allergies. She had to deal with asthma attacks, steroid injections and numerous trips to the hospital throughout her life, revealing she couldn’t touch animals without suffering extreme allergic reactions.  

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/the-real-reason-vicar-of-dibley-star-emma-chambers-died/news-story/277a2f5fb9a63fb2bd449e218b899473

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Charles John Mahoney (June 20, 1940 – February 4, 2018) – 

English-born American actor of stage, film, and television. 

Born in Blackpool, England and brought up in Manchester, Mahoney emigrated to the United States at the age of 18 and started his acting career on the stage in 1977, moving into film in 1980. He was best known for playing the blue-collar patriarch Martin Crane in the American sitcom Frasier, which aired on NBC from 1993 to 2004. In addition to his film and television work, Mahoney also worked as a voice actor and was particularly passionate about his stage work on Broadway and in Chicago theatre. 

Mahoney died in a Chicago hospice on February 4, 2018, of complications from throat cancer, originally diagnosed in 2014. He was 77 years old. According to his friend Anna Shapiro: "He was fragile and he was supposed to be having a routine procedure. But having just beat Stage 3 throat cancer, I think he was just too weak… By the time he did The Rembrandt he was clean of cancer... But other health issues came up and he was just too fragile." 

BTW: 

He was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, the seventh of eight children of Margaret and Reg, a baker. His family was evacuated to the sea-side resort to avoid the Nazi bombing of their native Manchester. The Mancunian Mahoneys eventually returned to Manchester during the war. Visiting the States to see his older sister, a "war bride" who had married an American, the young Mahoney decided to emigrate and was sponsored by his sister. John eventually won his citizenship by serving in the U.S. Army.  

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001498/bio?ref_=nm_dyk_qt_sm#quotes

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Jerry and Dick 

Jerry Van Dyke (July 27, 1931 – January 5, 2018) – 

American actor, musician and comedian. 

Jerry is the younger brother of Dick Van Dyke (1925 - ). 

Van Dyke made his television acting debut on The Dick Van Dyke Show with several guest appearances as Rob Petrie's brother Stacey. While his infrequent starring roles were typically in poorly received sitcoms, he enjoyed a long and successful career as a character actor in supporting and guest roles. From 1989 to 1997 he portrayed Luther Van Dam in Coach. 

On January 5, 2018, Van Dyke died at his Arkansas ranch, of heart failure at the age of 86. He was in declining health since being involved in a car accident two years earlier 

BTW: 

Van Dyke was the lead in the TV sitcom My Mother, the Car, that aired for a single season on NBC between September 14, 1965, and April 5, 1966. A total of 30 episodes were produced by United Artists Television. The premise features a man whose deceased mother communicates with him through a car radio. Critics and adult viewers generally disliked the show, often savagely. In 2002, TV Guide proclaimed it to be the second-worst of all time, behind The Jerry Springer Show. 

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John Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018) – 

American astronaut, naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer. 

Young became the ninth person to walk on the Moon as Commander of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. Young enjoyed the longest career of any astronaut, becoming the first person to fly six space missions (with seven launches, counting his lunar liftoff) over the course of 42 years of active NASA service. He is the only person to have piloted, and been commander of, four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo Command/Service Module, the Apollo Lunar Module, and the Space Shuttle. 

In 1965, Young flew on the first manned Gemini mission, and commanded another Gemini mission the next year. In 1969 during Apollo 10, he became the first person to fly solo around the Moon. He drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon's surface during Apollo 16, and is one of only three people to have flown to the Moon twice. He also commanded two Space Shuttle flights, including its first launch in 1981, and served as Chief of the Astronaut Office from 1974 to 1987. Young retired from NASA in 2004. He died on January 5, 2018 at his home in Houston of complications from pneumonia. He was 87 

BTW: 

Making the first manned flight of the Gemini spacecraft with Gus Grissom in 1965, Young scored another space first by smuggling a corned beef sandwich onto the spacecraft—a feat for which he was reprimanded. Some members of the US House of Representatives were not pleased about the stunt, claiming that Young cost tax payers millions of dollars by disrupting a scheduled test of space food during the flight.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Young_(astronaut)#Personal_life

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Roger Bannister crosses the finish line on 6 May, 1954 to break the four-minute mile barrier. 

Roger Bannister (23 March 1929 – 3 March 2018) – 

British middle-distance athlete and neurologist who ran the first sub-4-minute mile. 

At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Bannister set a British record in the 1500 metres and finished in fourth place. This achievement strengthened his resolve to become the first athlete to finish the mile run in under four minutes. He accomplished this feat on 6 May 1954 at Iffley Road track in Oxford, with Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher providing the pacing. When the announcer, Norris McWhirter, declared "The time was three...", the cheers of the crowd drowned out Bannister's exact time, which was 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. He had attained this record with minimal training, while practising as a junior doctor. Bannister's record lasted just 46 days. [The record was broken by Australian runner John Landy (Apil 12. 1930 - ) with a time of 3:57.9, a record that was to stand for 3 years.] 

Bannister went on to become a distinguished neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, before retiring in 1993. When asked whether the 4-minute mile was his proudest achievement, he said he felt prouder of his contribution to academic medicine through research into the responses of the nervous system. In 2011, Bannister was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He died on 3 March 2018 at the age of 88 in Oxford. 

Roger Bannister and John Landy at Iffley Road on the 50th anniversary of the four minute mile 6 May 2004 

BTW: 

The claim that a four-minute mile was once thought to be impossible by "informed" observers was and is a widely propagated myth created by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile (1955). The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a round number that lay slightly out of reach of the world record (by just 1.4 seconds) for nine years, which was longer than it might otherwise have been due to the effect of the Second World War in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries. The Swedish runners, Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942–45, had already lowered the world mile record by five seconds to the pre-Bannister record. Knowledgeable track fans are still most impressed by the fact that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bannister

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Naomi Parker Fraley (August 26, 1921 – January 20, 2018) – 

American war worker who is now considered the most likely model for the iconic "We Can Do It!" poster. 

During World War II, she worked on aircraft assembly at the Naval Air Station Alameda. She was photographed operating a machine tool and this widely used photograph was thought to be an inspiration for the poster. After the war, she worked as a waitress in Palm Springs and married three times. When she died, aged 96 in 2018, she was survived by her son and six step-children. 

On January 20, 2018, Parker died in Longview, Washington, at the age of 96. 

BTW: 

In 1942, Parker's photo was taken at a Pratt & Whitney vertical shaper and it appeared in local press including the Pittsburgh Press on July 5, 1942. The following year J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster was one of a series that appeared in factories at Westinghouse in a worker morale campaign. Miller could have seen the picture of Parker, and it is presumed that the newspaper photo was the source of his image.  

In 2011, Parker Fraley was at a reunion held at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park and there she spotted the 1942 photo of her operating a machine. She was surprised to find that the caption said that it was Geraldine Hoff Doyle and she wrote to the park to correct their mistake. They thanked her for telling them the correct name for the photo. Doyle had in innocence thought that the photo was of her and by extension she had decided that the poster was too. This mis-identification then became well-established as sources repeated it – an example of the Woozle effect. [The Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation, or a woozle, occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups, and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and nonfacts become urban myths and factoids.]  

Meanwhile, Seton Hall University professor James J. Kimble had become interested in the poster which was now an icon of the feminist movement. He tracked down the original photo and found that it was credited to "Naomi Parker" in 1942. Doyle was still at school and she had only worked at the plant for a few weeks. He found Naomi in 2015 to show her the photo and she still had the cutting from 1942. Kimble was certain that she is the woman in the photo, and considers her to be the strongest candidate to be the inspiration for the poster but noted that Miller did not leave any writings which could identify his model.  

In February 2015, Kimble interviewed the Parker sisters, known as Naomi Fern Fraley and Ada Wyn Morford and aged 93 and 91 respectively, and found that they had known for five years about the incorrect identification of the photo, and had been rebuffed in their attempt to correct the historical record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Parker_Fraley#Death

1942 photograph of Naomi Parker

More to come. . .