Overview: I'm giving context to why I cancelled my subscription. I look back to heroic actions taken by the New York Times and the Washington Post during the Vietnam war to compare to what appears to be the cowardly action of the Post and the LA Times owners today.
So we start with the Pentagon Papers story. Then we go to the vetoing of editorials supporting Kamala Harris for president by the owners of the two newspapers this week.
Then I mention an important article by Vaclav Havel that directly addresses what happens when owners of businesses voluntarily comply to pressure from authoritarian governments. But I'll save that discussion for the next post.
In 1971, The New York Times and the Washington Post were given copies of "The Pentagon Papers." This was a classified report on the Vietnam War. .
One of the researchers, Daniel Ellsberg, was disturbed that the research showed that the US government was lying to the people of the United States about major aspects of the Vietnam war.
Student protests had been going on constantly. In spring of 1970, four students at Kent State were shot dead by National Guardsman called to quell the protests on campus. This led to huge protests all over US campuses.
While I was a young adult during the times of the Pentagon papers and it is all still vivid in my mind, I'm writing all this because I realize that every US citizen under the age of 53, was not even born then. Even though they may have heard about the Pentagon Papers, most are probably have a very fuzzy understanding of the significance. I know that was my experience of current events that took place in recent history but before I was born. I'm just summarizing some highlights. You can read more at Wikipedia. Their article starts with the contents of the Papers. You have to scroll down to learn about the politics of publishing them in the newspapers.
Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers. In those days you generally had to copy page by page. He took them to Kissinger (who he knew) and to key Members of Congress, but didn't get the support he needed. Then he went to the New York Times and shared them. The Times began publishing excerpts on June 13.
The Nixon Administration tried to stop the publication by the Times with an injunction. The Washington Post then began to publish the documents. Also, Alaska US Senator Mike Gravel placed the full Pentagon Papers into the public record.
The Supreme Court decided 6-3 that
"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
Unfortunately the court's decision doesn't appear to be a compelling value to the owners who quashed the endorsements in their papers.
[Another interesting comparison to today: the Times published the first piece on June 13. The US Supreme Court announced its decision on June 30!]
Ellsberg was personally charged but was not found guilty.
I offer you this because this week the owners of both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post overruled their editorial boards' decisions to endorse Kamala Harris for president. There have been resignations by editors of both papers over this.
We can speculate why the owners took these actions.
"The Billionaire Owners of the Washington Post and LA Times Just Capitulated to Trump"
NPR's headline didn't attribute a motive to the Washington Post's decision,
"Washington Post' won't endorse in White House race for first time since 1980s"
but quoted former Washington Post former Executive Editor Martin Baron:
"This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty," Baron said in a statement to NPR. "Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."
This is, of course, why I have included the story of the Pentagon Papers. This is a far different action this week by the owner of the Washington Post than we saw from Katherine Graham, the owner of the Post in 1971.
Jeff Bezos, of course, is the owner of Amazon and one of the richest men in the world.
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a billionaire doctor who got rich based on medical technology he developed. His parents fled China during the Japanese occupation in WW II and Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa in 1952. I don't know exactly what his situation was, but here's a description of the status of Chinese in South Africa in Wikipedia:
"In 1966 the South African Institute of Race Relations described the negative effects of apartheid legislation on the Chinese community and the resulting brain drain:
No group is treated so inconsistently under South Africa's race legislation. Under the Immorality Act they are Non-White. The Group Areas Act says they are Coloured, subsection Chinese ... They are frequently mistaken for Japanese in public and have generally used White buses, hotels, cinemas and restaurants. But in Pretoria, only the consul-general's staff may use White buses .. Their future appears insecure and unstable. Because of past and present misery under South African laws, and what seems like more to come in the future, many Chinese are emigrating. Like many Coloured people who are leaving the country, they seem to favour Canada. Through humiliation and statutory discrimination South Africa is frustrating and alienating what should be a prized community.[5]: 389–390"
One would think that both Bezos and Soon-Shiong are rich and powerful enough to be able to stand up to Trump. But I'm guessing they both have goals and ambitions about what they still want to do with their companies. And they have put these ambitions above risking the possibility of retribution from Trump if he gets elected.
And I'm guessing Soon-Shiong, while treated as a non-white in South Africa, also took some solace that he wasn't treated as Black. It would be interesting to know how he felt when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and eventually became the president of South Africa and won a Nobel Prize.
His behavior in this matter suggests those events didn't really register with him positively. He's certainly now showing Mandela's courage in fighting an authoritarian government.
Cancelling the LA Times subscription was a clear choice, though not an easy one. I grew up in LA and when my mother died, I inherited the house that I lived in from 6th grade through the beginning of college. It's the house my mother lived in for 65 years, that we visited often, and that my children spent time when they visited their grandmother. In addition to getting reasonably good news coverage, I also got local news that was relevant to owning a house there and visiting.
But various social media folk have suggested other newspapers to switch to and I'll look into that. Though I won't get the local LA and California news. I'd note that when you cancel, you get a list of one or two word reasons to let them know why you cancelled. The best I could do was 'editorial policy' or something like that. Leaving comments elsewhere limits you to very few words.
[UPDATE Sunday November 3]
From an October 25, 2024 article in the LA Times, we learn what Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner, said about the decision not to endorse anyone for president, even though the editorial board was about to endorse Harris:
“'I have no regrets whatsoever. In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision,' he said in an interview with The Times on Friday afternoon. 'The process was [to decide]: how do we actually best inform our readers? And there could be nobody better than us who try to sift the facts from fiction' while leaving it to readers to make their own final decision."
Today's LA Times editorial page seems to belie that policy. Instead of "leaving it to readers to make their own decisions," the LA Times has a long list of ballot measures and candidates they endorse for other offices from local and state to federal.
The Municipality of Anchorage (MOA) Charter [the city's constitution] at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt
“Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.” AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.
Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules,
“Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)
[OK, before I lose most of my readers, let me just say, this is important stuff to know to understand why the next posts will look so closely at the engineer test that Jeff Graham did not pass. But it's also important to understand one of the fundamental principles underlying government in the United States (and other nations.) And I'd add that the concepts behind merit principles are applied in most large private organizations to some extent, though they may have different names.
Jeff Graham's attorney made me boil this down to the most basic points to improve the likelihood I wouldn't put the jury to sleep. So bear with me and keep reading.
And, you can see an annotated index of all the posts at the Graham v MOA tab above or just link here.]
Basic Parts of Government In The United States
Governments can be broken down into several parts.
The elected politicians who pass the laws and set the broad policy directions (legislature)
The elected executive who carries out the laws.
The administration is led by the elected executive - the president, the governor at the state level, and the mayor at the city level.
Civil Service refers to the career government workers who actually carry out the policies. There are also appointed officials at the highest levels who are exempt from some or all of the civil service rules.
Merit principles are the guidelines for how the career civil servants are governed.
So What Are Merit Principles?
Probably the most basic, as related to this case, are:
Employees are chosen solely based on their skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) that are directly related to their performance of the job.
The purpose of this is to make government as as effective and efficient as possible by hiring people based on their job related qualities and nothing else.
That also means other factors - political affiliation, race, color, nationality, marital status, age, and disability should not be considered in hiring or promotion. It also means that arbitrary actions and personal favoritism should not be involved.
Selection and promotion criteria should be as objective as possible.
So Steve, what you're saying, this sounds obvious. What else could there be?
Before the merit system was the Spoils System. Before merit principles were imposed on government organizations, jobs (the spoils) were given to the victors (winning politicians and their supporters) The intent of the Merit System is to hire the most qualified candidates.
Only a small number of federal positions were covered by this new civil service act, but over the years more and more positions were covered and the procedures improved with improvements in the technology of testing. The merit system, like any system can be abused, but it's far better than the spoils system. Objective testing is a big part of applying merit principles.
What does 'objective criteria' mean?
Objectivity has a couple common and overlapping meanings:
Grounded on facts. Grounding your understanding or belief on something concrete, tangible. Something measurable that different people could 'see' and agree on.
Unbiased. A second, implied meaning from the first, is that you make decisions neutrally, as free as you can be from bias, preconceived ideas. That’s not easy for most people to do, but there are ways to do it better.
What Ways Can Make Tests More Objective And Free Of Bias?
I think of objectivity as being on one end of a continuum and subjectivity being on the other end. No decision is completely objective or subjective, nor should it be. But generally, the more towards the objective side, the harder it is to introduce personal biases.*
In selection and promotion, we have tests. Test is defined as any thing used to weed out candidates, or rank candidates from poor to good. So even an application form can be a test if it would lead to someone being cut out of the candidate pool. Say candidates are required to have a college degree and someone doesn’t list one on an application. They would be eliminated already.
Again, how do you make tests more objective?
There are two key terms we need to know: validity and reliability.
What’s Validity?
Validity means that if a person scores higher on a test, we can expect that person to perform better on the specific job.
Or saying it another way, the test has to truly test for what is necessary for the job. So, if candidates without a college degree can do the job as well as candidates with a degree, then using college degree to screen out candidates is NOT valid.
And what is reliability?
Reliability means that if a person takes the same test at different times or different places, or with different graders, the person should get a very similar result. Each test situation needs to have the same conditions, whether you take the test on Monday or on Wednesday, in LA or Anchorage, with Mr. X or Miss Y administering and/or grading the test.
How Validity and Reliability Relate To Each Other
To be valid, the selection or promotion test must be a good predictor of success on the job. People who score high on the exam, should perform the job better than those who score low. And people who score low should perform worse on the job than people who score high.
BUT, even if the test is intrinsically valid, the way it is administered could invalidate it. If the test is not also reliable (testing and grading is consistent enough that different test takers will get a very similar score regardless of when or where they take the test and regardless of who scores the test) the test will no longer be valid. This is because the scores will no longer be good predictors of who will do well on the job.
How do you go about testing for validity and reliability?
This can get complicated, especially for factors that are not easy to measure. I didn't go into this during the trial. I wanted to point out some pages in a national Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual used by the Municipality of Anchorage, but I was not allowed to mention it. It talks about different levels of validity and how to test for them. It also says that for 'high stakes' tests, like promotion tests, experts should be hired to validate the test. The jury didn't get to hear about this. But it's relevant because as I wrote in an earlier post, the people in charge of testing, and specifically in charge of the engineer exam, only had Level I certification, which allows them to administer training and testing designed by someone with Level II certification. It's at Level II that validity and reliability are covered.
There really wasn't need to get detailed in the trial, because the oral exam was so egregiously invalid and unreliable that you you could just look at it and see the problems. And we'll do that in the next posts.
That should be enough but for people who want to know more about this, I'll give a bit more below.
*"the harder it is to introduce bias" There are always was that bias can be introduced, from unconscious bias to intentionally thwarting the system. When civil service was introduced in the United States, there was 'common understanding' that women were not qualified for most jobs. That was a form of bias. Blacks were also assumed to be unqualified for most jobs. Over the years these many of these sorts of cultural barriers have taken down. But people have found other ways to surreptitiously obstruct barriers. Merit Principles If you want to know more about merit principles I'd refer you to the Merit System Protection Board that was set up as part of the Merit System Reform Act of 1978. A little more about reliability problems (because these are important to understand about the engineer promotion exam) In the main part of this post I wrote that all the important (could affect the score) conditions of the test need to be the same no matter where or when or with whom a candidate takes the test. Here are some more details
Location - If one location is less comfortable - temperature, noise, furniture, lighting, whatever - it could skew the scores of test takers there.
Time - could be a problem in different ways.
All candidates must have the same amount of time to take the test.
Instructions - all instructions have to be identical
Security of the test questions - if some applicants know the questions in advance and others do not, the test is not reliable.
The scoring, too, has to be consistent from grader to grader for each applicant.
And there are numerous ways that scoring a test can go wrong.
Grader bias - conscious and unconscious. Raters who know the candidates may rate them differently than people who don’t know them at all.
The Halo effect means if you have a positive view of the candidate, you’re likely to give him or her more slack. You think, I know they know this?
The Horn or Devil Effect is the opposite - If you already have a negative opinion about a candidate, you consciously or unconsciously give that a candidate less credit. These are well documented biases.
Testing order bias affects graders and candidates.
After three poor candidates, a mediocre candidate may look good to graders.
Grading Standards - Is the grading scale clear and of a kind that the graders are familiar with?
Are the expected answers and how to score them clear to the graders?
Do the graders have enough time to calculate the scores consistently?
Grader Training -
If they aren't well trained, it could take a while to figure out how to use their scoring techniques, so they score different at the end from the beginning.
How Do You Overcome the Biases In More Subjective Tests Like Essays, Interviews, and Oral Exams?
You have to construct standardized, objective rubrics and grading scales - this is critical, particularly for essay and oral exams.
On November 9, 2016 when the electoral college vote totals were tallied, everyone saw the same facts, the same results. But half the country thought the numbers were good and half though they were bad.
When evaluating the facts of a job or promotion candidate, the organization has to agree, before hand, what ‘good’ facts look like and what ‘bad’ facts look like. Good ones are valid ones - they are accurate predictors of who is more likely to be successful in the position. Good and bad are determined by the test maker, not by the graders. The graders merely test whether the performance matches the pre-determined standard of a good performance.
What’s a rubric?
It’s where you describe in as much detail as possible what a good answer looks like. If you’re looking at content, you identify the key ideas in the answer, and possibly how many points a candidate should get if they mention each of those ideas. It has to be as objective as possible. The Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual has some examples, but even those aren't as strong as they could be.
Good rubrics take a lot of thought - but it's thought that helps you clarify and communicate what a good answer means so that different graders give the same answer the same score.
My experience is that good rubrics force graders to ground their scores on something concrete, but they can also miss interesting and unexpected things. It's useful for graders to score each candidate independently, and then discuss why they gave the scores they did - particularly those whose scores vary from most of the scores. Individual graders may know more about the topic which gives their scores more value. Or may not have paid close attention. Ultimately, it comes down to an individual making a judgment. Otherwise we could just let machines grade. But the more precise the scoring rubric, the easier it is to detect bias in the graders.
Accountability
Q: What if a candidate thinks she got the answer right on a question, but it was scored wrong?
Everything in the test has to be documented. Candidates should be able to see what questions they missed and how they were scored. If the test key had an error, they should be able to challenge it.
Q: Are you saying everything needs to be documented?
If there is going to be any accountability each candidate’s test and each grader’s score sheets must be maintained so that if there are questions about whether a test was graded correctly and consistently from candidate to candidate, it can be checked.
In the case of an oral exam or interview, at least an audio (if not video) record should be kept so that reviewers can see what was actually said at the time by the candidate and the graders.
Q: Have you strayed a bit from the Merit Principles?
Not at all. This all goes back to the key Merit Principle - selecting and promoting the most qualified candidates for the job. There won’t be 100% accuracy. But in general, if the test is valid, a high score will correlate with a high job performance. But unless the test is also reliable, it won’t be valid. The more reliable the test, the more consistent the scores will be under different conditions and graders. The best way to make tests more reliable is to make them as objective as possible.
[This is post #3 of a series on Graham v MOA. You can get an overview and index of all the posts here. Or just go to the Graham v. Municipality of Anchorage tab up above.]
Understanding the merit system and how to measure people's skills for a job are important to understanding why this case is important. So I beg your indulgence here. I've tried to make this pretty easy to digest.
Briefly, before the Merit System (and principles) governments were run on the spoils system - you got a government job if you helped get a candidate elected. Loyalty, not skill and public spirit, were the key job qualification. Merit principles don't guarantee fair hiring and promotion, but they go a long way in that direction.
Below is excerpted from the expert witness report I wrote up October 2016. The judge did not allow the plaintiff to use the MOA (Municipality of Anchorage) charter because he said the promotion process is part of the collective bargaining agreement. Collective bargaining agreements are approved (on the MOA side) by the Assembly. But the Charter can only be amended by a vote of the people of Anchorage. So I still don't understand how the contract would trump the Charter. But I'm not a lawyer.
Here's from my report:
Background and Purpose of Merit Principles and Systems
Race and age bias, in the context of promotion of a public employee, is an important issue. But the bigger issue is merit system principles. Modern human resources departments in reasonably sized organizations both public and private use what is known as a merit system. The system stems from the 19th Century when governmental structures were evolving from feudal systems based on loyalty to the ruler, to more modern ones, based on rationality. Scholar Max Weber noted that a new form of organization was emerging which he called a bureaucracy, that was based on rational rules rather than the arbitrary decisions of a ruler.
The point was that organizations that hired people based on their ability to do specific jobs and not on their relationship and loyalty to the ruler were more effective, more efficient, and more permanent.
These ideas of selecting the best person for the job were also promoted in the factory in the early 20th Century by Frederick Taylor and his idea of Scientific Management became widely adopted. Over time, the ideas underlying Weber and Taylor - the idea that rational, scientific analysis can be applied to management - took hold in private companies. Applicants would be evaluated by their qualifications to hold their jobs, though personal connections and other biases still were a factor.
In government the change took place both on the federal level and state and local levels. In 1883, the Pendleton Act established the US Civil Service after President Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job seeker. It only applied to a small percentage of jobs at first, but over the years, it has come to cover most federal positions in the career civil service.
On the local level, reformists pushed for merit systems as a way to combat the big city political machines like Tammany Hall that recruited immigrants into their political party with promises of government jobs, as they arrived in the US from Europe.
So, both in government and in the private sector these ideas of rational rules to develop a competent workforce took hold. But the biases of the times often got written into the rules. Job tests were written so that new immigrants wouldn’t pass. Women were assumed ineligible for most jobs and fired from those they could take - like teacher - if they got married. The societal structure which kept people of color in segregated housing, deficient schools, in poverty, prevented most people of color from getting the needed qualifications, or even from knowing about job openings. And overt racism prevented those who could qualify from being hired in most cases.
The civil rights movement changed that. Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schools. This was supposed to lead to African-Americans (particularly) getting better high school educations, then into universities, and then into good jobs. But many communities opposed busing and set up all-white private schools, leaving the public schools for African-Americans and the poor.
The Voting Rights Act was intended to prevent laws that kept Blacks from voting. Griggs v. Duke Power was a groundbreaking case in terms of job discrimination. Black workers traditionally got the lowest level jobs and got paid less than white workers. When they were required to put in tests for employees seeking supervisory positions, Duke Power created tests that were unrelated to the position and intended to keep blacks from passing. The Supreme Court struck this down saying that the tests for the jobs had to be related to the work that would be done. They also said that the plaintiffs didn’t have to prove intentional discrimination, only that the test had a disparate impact on the minority candidates.
The merit system was an outgrowth of science being applied to management to ensure more qualified employees got hired. Businesses developed measures that focused on someone’s ability to successfully do the job. The civil rights movement fit perfectly into this theoretical ideal. Job requirements should focus on qualifications, not race or gender. Griggs v. Duke Power drew back the curtain on the hidden biases that were blocking access to better employment for women and minorities.
Today we’ve come a long way, but we are still a society that sees minority actors in movie roles as criminals or maids or chauffeurs much more than as doctors or lawyers or accountants. Many people still cringe at the idea of their daughter marrying someone of a different race or religion. When those feelings spill over into the workplace, into hiring, it’s illegal discrimination.
Unconscious racial bias perpetuates discrimination through assumptions about people based on their race or other characteristics. Conscious bias attempts to set up barriers that seem legitimate, but are actually intended to keep out undesired applicants.
The merit system is one of the best ways to thwart discrimination so that the most qualified candidates, not the most ‘like us’ candidates, get hired. It’s the best antidote we have to cronyism, racism, and other forms of discrimination in hiring and promoting employees.
Merit Principles and Systems at Municipality of Anchorage
The MOA Charter at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt “Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.” AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.
Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules, “Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)
According to the Firefighters collective bargaining agreement, the conduct and administration of the Anchorage Fire Department, including selection and promotion of employees, are retained by the Municipality. (IAFF-MOA CBA Section 3.1)
Application of Merit Principles to Making And Evaluating Objective Examinations
In practice, the term merit principles means using procedures that ensure that decisions are made rationally to select and promote those people who are most suited for a job. They mean that organizations do their best to identify the factors that best predict which applicant is most likely to succeed in the position. Factors that are irrelevant to someone’s success on the job should not be part of the process.
A test (or examination as used by the MOA) is any process used to evaluate an applicant’s suitability for a position. An application form can be thought of as a test to the extent that information is used to distinguish between applicants who qualify and those who do not. A written exam, a practical exam, an interview are all tests when it comes to activities like selection and promotion.
Two basic factors are important when evaluating tests used in personnel decisions. First, is the test valid? Second, is the test reliable? Validity means that the test, in fact, tests what it is supposed to test. In employment that generally means it is useful in separating those applicants most likely to do well in the position from those less likely to do well. For example, if a college degree is required for a position, but those without college degrees do was well as those with a degree, then that is not a valid factor to consider, because it doesn’t predict success on the job. It is common to give applicants a written or practical test or an interview. These are scored and applicants with higher scores are selected over people with lower scores.
Such tests are valid only if it is true that people with higher scores are more likely to be successful in the position than those with lower scores. That is, people with higher scores are more likely to do well AND people with lower scores are more likely to do poorly. If that is not the case, the test is not valid.
Employment tests can be validated by checking scores against actual performance of employees, though this does require selecting employees with low scores as well as with high scores to determine if the lower scoring employees really do perform poorly compared to the higher scoring employees. This can be expensive and many organizations use ‘common sense.’ But common sense may not be accurate and if an employer is accused of discrimination, they will have to defend the validity of the test.
For rare, specialized positions, validation is difficult to do. For common positions that are similar across the nation, such as fire fighters, there are often companies that prepare, validate, and sell, and even administer employment tests. Reliability means that the way a test is administered is consistent. The same applicant, taking the test at different times or locations or with different testers, would have basically the same result every time. When people take the college entrance exams, for instance, the conditions are standardized. No matter where someone takes the test, they get exactly the same instructions, the physical conditions of the test room are within certain parameters (desk size, temperature, noise level, etc.) and they all have exactly the same amount of time to complete the exam. The scoring of the exams is also the same for everyone.
To ensure reliability of the test taking, all conditions that could affect the outcome must be the same. To ensure reliability of scoring, the way points are calculated must be as objective and measurable as possible. Often tests are designed with scales that help a rater know how to give points or how to put applicants in the correct category.
At the most basic level you might just have a scale of 1 - 5 for instance, with ‘good’ at one end and ‘poor’ at the other end. But how does the rater determine what’s good or bad?
Better would be to have a more objective descriptor such as “successfully completed task with no errors” on one end and “failed to complete the task” at the other end. Even better would be to have descriptors for each point on the scale. The more that the descriptor describes an actual objectively testable level of achievement, the more likely it is that different raters would come up with the same score. For example, ‘meets expectations’ is not as objective as “accomplished the task within 2 minutes with no errors that compromised the outcome.”
Basically, the greater the objectivity of the scoring system, the greater the likelihood of reliability, because there is a clear standard attached to each number in the scale. And with a more objective system, discrepancies can be more easily spotted. A biased evaluator has a harder job to select favored applicants or disqualify disfavored candidates. Also, a candidate who was graded unfairly has a better chance of challenging the score.
Another way to increase reliability is to train evaluators on how to use the scoring system. It is also helpful to have raters who do not have personal relationships with the applicants.
Given the need for validity and reliability, interviews, while frequently used, have been found to be prone to many biases unrelated to the job. There are ways to improve the validity and reliability of interviews. The questions asked must be clearly tied to ability to be successful in the position, recognizing that being able to perform a task is not the same as being able to describe how one would perform a task. If personality and speaking ability are not being tested, then interviews can become treacherous employment tests for the applicant and for the employer. The more subjective a test and the rating system, the easier it is to bias the outcome, whether unintentionally or intentionally.
Since proving intent to discriminate requires overhearing private conversations or emails, this is an impossible hurdle for most applicants. The courts have recognized this and have allowed ‘impact’ to be used in lieu of intent. But employment tests can often give us evidence of intent if they are subjective and there is little or no validity or reliability.
Conclusion
I have seen no materials that offer any information on the validity or reliability of the tests used in the engineer promotional examinations which Jeff Graham has taken. The exam score sheets I have seen lack rigorous descriptors for raters (or proctors) to calculate scores for applicants and appear extremely subjective. The materials I’ve seen that were used to train the raters were lacking in detail and substance.
Without evidence to show the exams are valid and reliable, one must assume that the exams do not comply with the Municipality’s mandate to follow merit principles. [Such proof of validation had been requested from but not provide by the MOA.] The point of merit systems is to identify the most qualified candidates for each position and to prevent the introduction of personal biases into their scoring of candidates. The tests themselves may or may not be discriminatory. But when they are subjective as the oral board/peer reviews are, biases of the raters are easily introduced into the scoring of candidates. The type of bias could be racial, sexual, age based, or personal depending on the rater.
It is my understanding that MOA has not produced all requested materials and that depositions still remain to be done in this case. I therefore reserve the right, should additional materials and information become available, to modify or supplement this report.
Because merit principles were ruled out as the measure the jury would use to evaluate the case, this report was not introduced in court or given to the jury. However, I was allowed to testify on merit principles in general, but not allowed to relate them to the facts of the case, or even to the MOA.
I was also not allowed to refer to the Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual that the MOA uses which talks about validity in some detail and also talks about 'high stakes' tests - like a promotion test - needing to be professionally prepared and validated.
I was allowed to talk about, again in general terms and not relating what I said to the AFD exams, subjectivity and objectivity. I acknowledged there is no such thing as 100% objective or subjective, but that there is a continuum from some theoretical total subjectivity to theoretical total objectivity. The goal of test makers is to have tests as far to the objective side of the continuum as possible. The more subjective a test, the easier it is to introduce bias, conscious or unconscious.
This story idea popped into my head recently. Probably because of all the stories about huge budget cuts to the University of Alaska plus bills to make it legal to carry guns on campus. Along with the legislature's reluctance to end subsidies for the oil companies and all the mega-projects which are, in effect, subsidies for construction companies.
We've already passed April 1, so I can't just put this up straight. Although it's far fetched, some of the people I've mentioned this story to said things like, "Oh, I didn't hear that yet." They just took it for real without blinking. An Irony icon (*I*) might get overlooked.
So I want you to consider this genre of literature: Legislative Fiction. Like science fiction, which imagines a world changed by future developments in science and technology, legislative fiction imagines a world in which the wildest desires of some legislators are fulfilled. In this case, I'm pushing to the limits conservative desires to privatize government functions that they think could be done as well by the private sector, their concern about radical left-wing faculty brainwashing their students, and their desire to reward private sector supporters and funders.
So here's my short story.
Alaska's Majority coalition legislators have announced they are working to sell the University of Alaska Anchorage to Charter College. The deal is being handled by developer Mark Pfeffer, whose commission should more than make up for any losses at the LIO. In the tradition of the Alaska Republican majority, not only do they propose to sell the campus, they are giving Charter College a $500 million zero interest loan, so Charter can afford to make the purchase. The sale will also effectively cancel all union contracts, pension obligations, and health benefits.
Among the Worst Graduation Rates Only 23.6% of students graduate from Charter College - Anchorage on-time (two or four years depending on the degree) and only 25.4% graduate at all, ranking this school among the worst in the country in both categories. Graduating From College Isn't for Everyone. The Majority of Non-Grads at this School Dropped Out.
74.6% of students at Charter College - Anchorage failed to graduate within 150% of the expected time. The majority did so because they dropped out.
Senator D, said he thought they could also achieve those levels with the University.
I have a friend. I went to his Charter College graduation in 2010, at the Performing Art Center. Except that after he 'graduated', he was he still had two more classes to take. Over time that escalated to four and then six classes. I know this because I went with him several times when he spoke to a counselor and then a higher level administrator.
But he finally got this all completed and we went to graduation again Friday night.
Here's the President talking to the grads with the faculty in the background.
Here's a grad getting his diploma.
I'm thinking lots of thoughts, but it's late and I need to go to bed. It did make me wish the Regents hadn't eliminated the Community College system.
And the lady in blue. Well, I took the picture down. She wore a very short skirt and very high heels walking out of the PAC. I found myself debating whether I should post the picture or not and decided that if I have a question, I should not post it. While I took the picture in a public place and you can't see her face, I didn't ask her permission. I'm still trying to articulate my gut feeling and I can't yet.
I was looking for the Alaska Constitution and got linked from the Legislative website to this notice on the Lt Governor's website:
Page not found.
We're sorry, the link you tried has expired or is no longer available
Yesterday when I tried to link from a national state legislative districts website to get individual Alaska district maps, I got the same announcement, also from the Lt. Governor's page. I understand the Lt. Governor may want to revamp the website, especially since the old pages had the name of the previous Lt. Governor on them. And to his credit, Treadwell has not put his name on the new URLs. But they might also pay attention to how many people are linked to them and even send them messages.
I know this is possible because I got an email from the Greater Ormand Street Hospital in London advising me they were changing their URL and asking me to change my link to the new one.
So, while I was on the Lt. Governor's site trying to find the Constitution I found this notice:
Lt. Gov. Treadwell to Deliver Charter College Commencement Address
April 8, 2011, Anchorage, AK – Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell will deliver the commencement address to Charter College graduates tomorrow at 1:00 pm. In his speech, Lt. Gov. Treadwell will announce his goals as the new co-chair of Alaska’s State Committee on Research.
Who: Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell
What: Charter College Commencement address
When: Saturday, April 9 at 1:00 pm
Where: Atwood Hall, Anchorage Performing Arts Center, AK
Contact: Michelle Toohey (907) 269-7460
Sorry, it was last Saturday, so you missed it. But I went to the graduation last year. I knew one of the graduates. Well, he still had a couple classes to complete. Lt. Governor Craig Campbell was the commencement speaker last year at Charter College.
My question is this: What is the link between Charter College and the Lt. Governor's office?
I know someone, let's call him Mike, who has attended a number of for-profit colleges, mostly on-line. They've promised him all sorts of things and helped him get student loans from the government.
Charter College Graduation - Faculty
After he graduated from high school - a questionable achievement from a small rural school where a relative was involved in deciding who graduated - he applied to University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). They told him, after he took some tests, he had to take a number of remedial courses. This seemed like a hassle so he looked around online and quickly found schools eager to enroll him for online classes, and they would help him get federal student loans. The tuition at all these private colleges was MUCH higher than at UAA.
I'm writing about this because of a NY Times editorial today about new regulations for colleges regarding student loans.
The Obama administration has proposed tough and much-needed regulations for lucrative for-profit colleges. Industry is predictably pushing back hard, with legions of high-priced lobbyists and organized letter-writing campaigns. The administration must hold its ground.
The final rules, due out in November, must be strong enough to rein in businesses that have made an art of enrolling students who have no chance of graduating and stripping them of state and federal grants and loans. Besides ending such abuses of students, the regulations are needed to protect taxpayers, who foot the bill for waste and abuse in the college aid program.
Lt. Gov Campbell - Grad Speaker
Mike has never finished a program, but has huge debts now that likely will never be paid. The money goes from the government loan program to the college. Then the student owes the money. If he doesn't pass his classes or pay his debt, the college still has the money and he has the debt. This is someone with developmental problems. He can do many things well and seems normal, sort of. He's a good person, but there are serious gaps in his cognitive abilities.
He's been taking classes at Charter College and recently went through graduation, though he hasn't completed all his coursework yet. We were invited and attended at the Atwood Center in the Performing Arts Center downtown.
I've been wondering how to address this event and this seems like a reasonable context. I don't know how good the classes are. Mike told me that basically you just have to go to class and pay your bills. But that's just one person's story. I'm sure that you can learn things. I'm sure he's learning something. But can you get a degree without learning much? It sounds like the answer is yes. And they charge a lot more than UAA and it seems there is a big incentive to get the student loan money that is available.
In Lobby after Grad Ceremony
After hearing Mike's tales of woe, and how he talks about his $40,000 student debt which - has resulted, almost, in an AA degree - I tend to think that some sort of legislation cracking down on these private colleges (and public colleges that have large numbers of defaulting loans from students) needs to be passed and enforced.
Of course, there's a much larger context to discuss - what is the purpose of a college degree? What kind of jobs really require one? Should everyone go to college? What sort of status does a college degree confer? There are complex issues, but they'll have to wait for a different post.
I have a small pile of unwritten posts - the Democratic Unity Dinner last Tuesday, How Exit Glacier introduced me to Salfón, el limpiador de tejados, something on the uniting possibilities of funerals, the Charter College Graduation, and others that will probably slip away as time passes and more current events take priority.
So I was going to post these photos from the botanical garden yesterday just because I thought they were pretty neat. In one case, I was smart and took a picture of name of the flower so I'd remember. This red one is a masterwort - Astrantia "Ruby Wedding" Apiaceae.
But I got so caught up shooting these two that I forgot to the the name.
I was even going to ride back to the gardens and find out. A good excuse to get some exercise. But I had some things to take care of and then it started to rain really hard.
Hard enough that the drops were actually splashing on our deck table. And I decided you're going to have to just appreciate the flowers and their insect friends as anonymous visitors to the blog. But I'm now on the lookout for a good insect field guide, one that allows me to distinguish between different types of flies like the two in the pictures above.
Even though the rain is down to a light drizzle now, my back fender somehow disappeared Saturday when we were out in pretty substantial rain. You can get a sense from this picture of water in Chester Creek gushing out from under New Seward Highway.
In January 2008 I put up a post on famous people born in 1908. I had been looking to write about things that happened in 1908, but found the list of people much more interesting. I added more information about each person than the original site had. I did the same thing in January 2009. It got a little more elaborate. This year when I looked up the old site, it had changed its format and finding people born in a single years was more difficult, so I found another site. But it had lots, lots more names. And we were getting ready to go to Juneau, and so I never finished the post. But we're still in the first half of the year, so here's my post on famous and/or important people born 100 years ago.
[Update Nov 13, 2011: There's now also a Famous People Born in 1911.] [I seem to have skipped 1912. There are four parts for 1913. Here's 1914, and two parts for 1915]
It appears that one person on the list is still alive: economist Edward Coase. Johnny Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach died at 99 this year on May 31.
I would also note that in 1910 Mark Twain, William James, O. Henry, Robert Koch, Florence Nightingale, King Edward VII, Leo Tolstoy, Winslow Homer, Henri Rousseau, and Mary Baker Eddy died.
The ones with bios and pictures are in order of death, from the youngest to the oldest.
Django Reinhardt
Gypsy jazz guitarist 23-Jan-1910 - 16-May-1953
Born in Liberchies, Pont-à-Celles, Belgium, Reinhardt's Gypsy nickname "Django" was Romani for "I awake."
He spent most of his youth in gypsy encampments close to Paris, playing banjo, guitar and violin from an early age, and professionally at Bal-musette Halls in Paris. He started first on the violin and eventually moved on to a banjo-guitar that had been given to him and his first known recordings (in 1928) were of him playing the banjo. ( Text and photo above from guitarmasterclass.net )
A fire in 1928 burned his left hand and right side badly
Django was bedridden for eighteen months. During this time he was given a guitar, and with great determination Django created a whole new fingering system built around the two fingers on his left hand that had full mobility. His fourth and fifth digits of the left hand were permanently curled towards the palm due to the tendons shrinking from the heat of the fire. He could use them on the first two strings of the guitar for chords and octaves but complete extension of these fingers was impossible. His soloing was all done with the index and middle fingers! Film clips of Django show his technique to be graceful and precise, almost defying belief. . . [You can see this in the video below.]
Django was influenced by jazz recordings of Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. This new music found a place deep in Django's heart. It provided the perfect vehicle for his prodigious talent for improvisation. Django rarely if ever played a solo the same way twice. Numerous recordings prove this to be true. His creative genius was not only that of the master improviser, but also that of the composer, and he can be credited with numerous pieces with beautiful melodies and sophisticated, subtle harmonic structures. However, Django could not read or write musical notation and he was at the mercy of others that could to get his ideas down on paper. . .
1934 proved to be the most important year of his life. [You can read it all at redhotjazz.]
Eero Saarinen, who was born in Hvitträsk, coincidentally shared the same
birthday as his father, Eliel Saarinen [1]. Saarinen emigrated to the United States of America in 1923 at the age of thirteen. [2]. He grew up within the community of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where his father taught. Saarinen studied under his father at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he took courses in sculpture and furniture design. He had a close relationship with fellow students Charles and Ray Eames, and became good friends with Florence (Schust) Knoll. Beginning in September 1929, he studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France.[3] He then went on to study at the Yale School of Architecture, completing his studies in 1934. Subsequently, he toured Europe and North Africa for a year and returned for a year to his native Finland, after which he returned to Cranbrook to work for his father and teach at the academy. He became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1940. Saarinen was recruited by his friend, who was also an architect, to join the military service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Saarinen was assigned to draw illustrations for bomb disassembly manuals and to provide designs for the Situation Room in the White House .[citation needed] Saarinen worked full time for the OSS until 1944.[3] After his father's death in 1950, Saarinen founded his own architect's office, "Eero Saarinen and Associates".
The first major work by Saarinen, in collaboration with his father, was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. It follows the rationalist design Miesian style: incorporating steel and glass, but with the added accent of panels in two shades of blue. The GM technical center was constructed in 1956, with Saarinen using models. These models allowed him to share his ideas with others, and gather input from other professionals. With the success of the scheme, Saarinen was then invited by other major American corporations to design their new headquarters: these included John Deere, IBM, and CBS. Despite their rationality, however, the interiors usually contained more dramatic sweeping staircases, as well as furniture designed by Saarinen, such as the Pedestal Series. In the 1950s he began to receive more commissions from American universities for campus designs and individual buildings; these include the Noyes dormitory at Vassar, as well as an ice rink, Morse College, and Ezra Stiles College at Yale University. Both the Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale have received criticism from students for failing to fulfill basic dormitory needs.[Wikipedia]
He served on the jury for the Sydney Opera House commission and was crucial in the selection of the internationally-known design by Jørn Utzon.[Photos from Missourilandmarks.com]
Jimmy Dodd
Mickey Mouse Club host 28-Mar-1910 - 10-Nov-1964
(Photo from ultimatedisney.)
If you weren't around in the 1950s you won't understand the impact Jimmy Dodd had on kids. The Mickey Mouse Club was the biggest kid show around, and you can see on the video below, it was pretty basic. And Jimmy Dodd was the lead Mouseketeer. This was before the first Disneyland opened in Anaheim.
I don't know that many people knew much about who Jimmy Dodd was. The most complete bio I found of Jimmy Dodd was at originalmmc. Here's just a bit and you can see a lot more at the link.
His parents divorced while Jimmie was a small boy, and for several years he and his mother lived with her sisters, none of whom ever married. Jimmie's father lived two houses away, and had switched jobs to being a salesman in a music store. . .
The easy access to instruments and scores provided by his father's store stimulated Jimmie's lifelong interest and affinity for music. From his father he may have also picked up his positive attitude and the inclination for acting, both being key requisites for a successful salesman. Jimmie's deep religious faith developed at a much later time, but may have had its early grounding in the household dominated by his maiden aunts. . .
Jimmie appeared in 77 films prior to 1955, in most of which he had uncredited roles. One of his larger parts was a recurring role as Lullaby Joslin in the 'Three Mesquiteers' films for Republic Pictures. Other memorable pictures he played in were Flying Tigers (1942), Corvette K-225 (1943), Janie (1944), Night and Day (1946), Buck Privates Come Home (1947), and Kidnapped (1948).
Jimmie also wrote songs during the forties (Nashville Blues, Rosemary, Amarillo), and in 1946 joined ASCAP with Meet Me In Monterey. The songwriting income, though small, became more important as the advent of television after the war greatly reduced the number of films being made. Jimmie's health was precarious, and in 1951 he was hospitalized for a grave illness. The hospitalization and long recovery left Jimmie and Ruth in a financial crunch, that was only relieved by a $1000 prize for writing the song Washington, the official song of the District of Columbia.
But the two years before the Mickey Mouse Club started he had only one extra film bit and one TV appearance each year, and he and Ruth were again in tough straits financially. It was at this point that he and Ruth became "born-again" Christians, after joining a Hollywood-based Christian Professional group.
Soon afterwards, a tennis partner of his named Bill Justice, a long-time animator at Disney, called him and said the studio needed someone to write a song about a pencil. Jimmie dashed off the song and sent a demo record of it over to the studio. He was hired by Disney executive Jimmy Johnson, and assigned to write songs for cartoons and the Disneyland show. Producer Bill Walsh knew Jimmie would be an excellent host for the Mickey Mouse Club, but to cinch it he had to get Walt Disney to think it was his own idea. So he had Jimmie perform The Pencil Song for Walt, who immediately suggested Jimmie as a host for the show. (Mouseketeer fans can get the rest here.)
The video is a bit long (6 minutes) and goes beyond Jimmy Dodd and on to the Disneyland television show, but it also has some key parts from the Mickey Mouse Club.
Georges Pire
Religion 10-Feb-1910 - 30-Jan-1969
Activist monk, Nobel Prize recipient
Georges Charles Clement Ghislain Pire (February 10, 1910-January 30, 1969), born in Dinant, Belgium, the first child of Georges and Berthe (Ravet) Pire, assigned his life to action in striving to achieve understanding among peoples of the world, to eliminate poverty and hopelessness in the emerging nations, to alleviate the lot of the refugees of the post-World War II period. His refugee work may well have stirred memories of his own childhood, for when he was four and a half, he and his family fled from Belgium before the advancing German troops in 1914, spending four years in France and returning to find their home a charred ruin.
In Dinant where his father was a civic official, Georges Pire studied classics and philosophy at the Collège de Bellevue and at eighteen entered the Dominican monastery of La Sarte in Huy, Belgium, where he took the name Henri Dominique and said his final vows on September 23,1932.
He continued his studies at the Collegio Angelico, the Dominican university in Rome, was ordained in 1934, and granted the doctorate in theology in 1936. After a year of study in the social sciences at the University of Louvain in Belgium, he returned to the monastery at Huy to teach sociology and moral philosophy.
In 1938, the Reverend Father Pire began his long service of organizational work for the unfortunate by founding the Service d'entr'aide familiale [Mutual Family Aid] and Stations de plein air de Huy [Open Air Camps] for children. During and after World War II the stations were more than camps; they were missions that fed thousands of Belgian and French children. . .
Constantly supplementing his duties as curé of La Sarte, Father Pire decided early in 1949 to study the refugee problem. He visited the camps for refugees in Austria, wrote a book, Du Rhin au Danube avec 60,000 D. P., and founded an organization, Aid to Displaced Persons.
There were three levels of action in Father Pire's work for the refugees. There was, first, his «sponsoring» movement in which interested people could «sponsor» a family of refugees, sending parcels and letters of encouragement; by 1960 there were some 18,000 sponsors. On a second level there were his homes for the aged, four of them, all situated in Belgium: at Huy (1950), Esneux (1951), Aertslaer (1953), and Braine-le-Comte (1954).
It was evident, however, that the refugees needed to have the opportunity to put down roots, to gain economic independence, to achieve psychological wholeness. Consequently, Father Pire conceived the idea of building small villages for them, to be located on the outskirts of a city where these communities would be free to grow, not in the center of a city where they might degenerate into ghettoes. Using private contributions from the «hearts of men», he constructed seven «European Villages», each for about 150 people: at Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany (1956); Bregenz, Austria (1956); Augsburg, Germany (1957); Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Belgium, (the Fridtjof Nansen Village, 1958); Spiesen in the Saar (the Albert Schweitzer Village, 1958); Wuppertal, Germany (the Anne Frank Village, 1959); Euskirchen, Germany (1962). All seven of these villages still exist, each now housing about twenty D. P. families.
During the 1930s, baseball fans flocked to stadiums across the United States to get a peek of Dizzy Dean, the anchor of the St. Louis Cardinals' pitching staff. Dean was a dominant pitcher, to be sure—with his intimidating fastball, Dean hurled his way to four consecutive strikeout titles (1932-1935) and had four seasons with 20 or more wins. Over his career, Dean struck out 1,163 batters in 1,967 innings. Along with his fastball, Dean served up plenty of shenanigans, making him one of baseball's premier gate attractions. Once, he brought a black cat into the stadium and pretended to put a hex on the rival team. Other times, he joked around on the loudspeaker before the game. Dean was also a beloved braggart. Time and again, Dean predicted the impossible, then stepped to the mound and made it come true. To spectators suffering from the hardships of the Depression, the fun-loving, fastball-pitching Dean served as a beacon of hope. He was the uncultured country boy made good, a hero who had somehow escaped the hardships they could not. (Sketch by Lisa Frick and photo from dizzydean.com)
In 1934, Dean's kid brother, Paul, joined the Cardinals' pitching staff. Dean bragged about his little brother's talent and predicted that they would win 45 games between them. Dizzy Dean won 30 that season, while his little brother won 19, for a total of 49. The Cardinals also won the pennant and ended up in the World Series playing the Detroit Tigers. Once again, the immodest Dizzy Dean spouted off, saying that he and his kid brother would win the series for the Cardinals. Again, he was right. The Dean brothers each won two games apiece in the series, giving the Cardinals the championship. It was a phenomenal season for Dizzy Dean, who led the National League in wins (30), complete games (24), shutouts (7), and strikeouts (195). He was named the National League Most Valuable Player (MVP), as well as World Series MVP.
American composer Samuel Barber often confuses critics. He founded no school; he stuck to no one style. As a public figure, he seemed aloof from the various critical fights of American music: tonal vs. atonal, Igor Stravinsky vs. Arnold Schoenberg, and old-guard vs. modern. Almost all the other big names of American modernism – Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, David Diamond, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt – allied themselves with particular camps. Barber seemed just to write music, and, in so doing, became controversial, someone to be attacked or defended.
Barber distinguished himself as a melodist. Almost everything he wrote has at least one gorgeous tune or memorable theme. This alone got him into trouble in certain circles as a stick-in-the-mud or even as a panderer to the vulgar. However, his gift also genuinely puzzled people. There is nothing in a Barber piece that instantly proclaims the composer, as a Copland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, or Serge Prokofieff work surely does. His melodic emphasis led certain critics to label him "neo-Romantic," a word that doesn't mean all that much. Almost nothing he wrote could have been produced in the Romantic era. The harmonies are too complex and sometimes extremely dissonant, the approach to form is as modern as Igor Stravinsky's, and the orchestration is usually quite experimental. That his music sounds full and rich simply means that the experiment succeeds. [From classical.net]
Jean Genet
Novelist 19-Dec-1910 - 15-Apr-1986
Theatre of the Absurd
This French writer, a dramatist and convicted felon, became one of the leading figures in the avant-garde theater. Genet' depicted the world of male prostitutes, convicts, pimps and social outcasts, the dark side of society which knew by his own experience. For a long time he was so addicted to theft that he stole diamonds from his hostesses at a literary reception. However, Genet's life changed radically when such prominent figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau clamored successfully for his parole. He subsequently escaped his criminal past and embarked on a new career as a writer, who glorified homosexual love and lawbreaking. "O let me be nothing but beauty alone! Quickly or slowly I will go, but I will dare what must be dared. I will destroy appearances, the casings will be burnt off and will fall from me, and I will appear there, some evening, on the palm of your hand, calm and pure like a statuette of glass." (from The Thief's Journal, 1954) [The rest is at kirjasto. Photo from Leninimports.]
Scatman Crothers
Jazz Musician and Actor 23-May-1910 - 22-Nov-1986
His father was a cobbler and the proprietor of a second-hand clothing store. At the age of 14, Crothers began teaching himself to play both drums and guitar, and to sing in the scat style later made popular by Louis Armstrong and others. Still in his teens, Crothers landed a job entertaining customers at one of the local speakeasies, a place frequented by Chicago mobsters trying to lie low. He received no salary at the roadhouse, but the lavish tips made him "the richest kid in high school," Crothers recalled in a 1981 Jet article.
Scatman learned music and played drums in various jazz and novelty groups in the late 20s and 30s. In the 1930's, he played with T-Bone Walker and Louis Armstrong, and formed a big band in 1936, getting the nickname "Scatman." Sam "The Man" Taylor began working with Scat Man Crothers and the Sunset Royal Orchestra in the late '30s. Scatman moved to L. A. in 1944 and began recording. His wide repertoire then included love songs, bebop, blues, swing, scat, and old jazz. . .
It was in the 1970s that Crothers finally broke through as a fixture in the big leagues of the entertainment industry. In 1970 Crothers played the voice of Scat Cat in the animated Walt Disney feature The Aristocats. That work led to further cartoon voice work. . .
To anybody who watched much television in the 1970s and early 1980s, very few faces or voices were more familiar than those of Scatman Crothers. Crothers is best remembered for his portrayal of Louie the Garbage Man on the NBC series Chico and the Man, but through his constant appearances on television talk shows (Johnny Carson show 18 times), dramas and sitcoms, and in such movies as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining, Crothers became one of the period's most visible cultural icons. He achieved this fame after toiling in near-anonymity for more than 50 years. During that time, he performed as a drummer, guitar- /banjo-/ukeleleist, singer, songwriter, and actor in entertainment settings ranging from prohibition-era speakeasies to high-tech 1980s movie studios. (There's a lot more at Rockabilly.nl. The photo is from historysanjose.org. )
Jean Anouilh
Playwright
23-Jun-1910 - 3-Oct-1987
Prolific French playwright, whose works ranged from high drama to absurdist farce. Anouilh's career spanned over five decades. Although he cannot be linked with any particular school or trend, he partly adopted Sartre's existentialist views and was also influenced by the way Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux created theater. Anouilh hated publicity, and remained reclusive all his life. Often his unsuccessful protagonist, idealistic and intransigent, is in conflict with the world of compromise and corruption. . .
Anouilh's early works were realistic and naturalistic studies of a sordid and corrupt world. Under the influence of such writers as Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Vitrac, Anouilh found a new angle into writing. Also classical French theater and the Italian dramatist Pirandello shaped his work. He often used the theater as the setting of his plays and struck a balance between farce and seriousness. "Thanks to Molière," Anouilh once said, "the true French theatre is the only one that is not gloomy, in which we laugh like men at war with out misery and our horror. This humor is one of France's messages to the world."
Anouilh grouped his plays under adjectives descriptive of their dominant tone: "black" (tragedies, realistic plays), "pink" (fantasy dominates), "brilliant" (combination of pink and black plays in aristocratic environments), "jarring" (black plays with bitter humour), "costumed" (with historical characters), "baroque," and mes fours (my failures). These adjectives occurred in the titles of each of his collections of plays. (From kirjasto . Photo from passionsbuehne)
A. J. Ayer
Philosopher 29-Oct-1910 - 27-Jun-1989
If you need to write a philosophy essay on A. J. Ayer you will need to include something about his objections to logical positivism and his Language, Truth and Logic. However you may want to include in your essay the fact that A. J. Ayer died twice. His first and temporary exit from this world occured shorlty after Ayer choked on a piece of Salmon. Apparently his personality changed post death, his wife remarked "he has got much nicer since he died". A. J. Ayer is notable in the 'Beyond Death Experience' community for being a notable Atheist that has reported experiences beyond death. This fascinating snippet of fact isn't going to make much of a dent into your philosophy essay on A. J. Ayer so how about using some of the A. J. Ayer resources below. If you haven't read Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic try the study guide or condensed version.
A. J. Ayer was not only a brilliant philosopher but also a gifted teacher and broadcaster. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1952 and knighted in 1970. An interest outside of philosophy was collectiing. Ayer collected stamps, cards, clocks and other collected items. Those that knew A J Ayer knew him as a fun, gregarious and sometimes unsual character. At a formal birthday party, a young Alfred 'freddie' Ayer jumped onto the table and ran down the length of it to grab a slice of birthday cake. Another childhood prank included pulling André Citroën's (after whom the famous car was named) chair away just before he sat down. [From philosophy.com; photo from unc]
Ayer was born into a wealthy family of continental origin. His mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father Jules Ayer was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.
He grew up in St John's Wood, London. He was educated at Ascham St Vincent's Preparatory School and Eton, and then won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He served as an officer in the Welsh Guards during World War II, working for the SOE. He was a noted social mixer and womanizer, and was married four times, including to Dee Wells and Vanessa Lawson (mother of Nigella Lawson). Reputedly he liked dancing and attending the clubs in London and New York. He was also obsessed with sports, a noted cricketer, and a keen supporter of the Tottenham Hotspur football team.
Ayer was a well-known social figure in his time, and his circle of friends included many famous people in public life, amongst them Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, George Orwell, E.E. Cummings, Meyer Schapiro, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, Stuart Hampshire, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Philip Toynbee, Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins, Michael Foot, Richard Crossman, Jonathan Miller, Angus Wilson, Alan Bennett, Alice Thomas Ellis, Jane Fontaine, Iris Murdoch, V. S. Pritchett, and Christopher Hitchens.[3]
In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer rejected atheism, as he understood it, on the grounds that any religious discourse was meaningless [2]. However, in later years Ayer, abandoning strict logical positivism, did refer to himself as an atheist [3] and stated that he did not believe in God [4]. He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston on the topic of religion. [From Wikipedia]
Alsop was an influential journalist for 50 years. A great nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, he had strong opinions and while basically Republican, he supported John F. Kennedy, and was also a strong supporter of the Vietnam War. He used his society connections well. See his New York Times obituary, Wikipedia Profile, a letter from Noam Chomsky, and this post from Open Salon (where I got the photo) for different views of Alsop.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Economist
18-Jan-1910 - 18-Mar-1993
While Boulding may not be a household name, this is someone whose work on systems theory I used as readings in my classes. So he's in.
Kenneth Boulding never knew any boundaries: born in Liverpool, he ascended class prejudice to a distinguished undergraduate career at Oxford - publishing his first paper (1932) while still there. Not bothering to pick up his B. Litt., Boulding proceeded to America. A meeting with Schumpeter on the transatlantic crossing led him to spend some time at Harvard before proceeding on to Chicago - where, under the influence of both Knight and Schultz he wrote a series of other papers on capital theory (pro-Knight, contra Austrians). Not bothering to pick up a Ph.D., Boulding went off to Scotland as an assitant lecturer at Edinburgh. In 1937, Boulding crossed back over to America, to Colgate this time, where he wrote his monumental two-volume textbook, Economic Analysis - the epitome of the Neoclassical- Keynesian Synthesis - before proceeding on to roam around the country: to work for the League of Nations at Princeton, at Fisk University in Tennessee, Iowa State College at Ames (where he wrote his famous 1944 paper on liquidity preference and his 1950 Reconstruction of Economics on stock-flow distinctions), University of Michigan (where he set up his "Center for Research in Conflict Resolution") - with intermediary stays at Stanford (where he set up the famous "Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences") and the International Christian University in Japan (from whence arose his first work on "evolutionary" economics (1970)) - before finally settling at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1967. [Text and photo from newschool homepage.]
The geographically-unbounded Boulding was also intellectually unbounded - perhaps a legacy of his early mentor and greatest influence, Frank Knight. His early work on opportunity cost, capital theory, international trade (collected in five massive volumes) and his 1941 textbook were exercises in mostly conventional economics - which earned him the prestigious J.B. Clark Medal of the AEA in 1949 (and the Presidency in 1968).
However, his 1944 paper and his 1950 book were attempts at reconstructing a balance-sheet approach to economics in an almost Post Keynesian vein. His work on fusing biology and economics in evolutionary economics (1970, 1978), were already intimated in his influential 1956 tract, The Image. He insisted on bringing in more aspects of economic behavior into economic life. Of his tripartite classification of economic activity - exchange, threat and grants - only the first he felt had been dealt with by economic theory (and even then, inadequately). The latter two, after much resistance, are only now being considered seriously in economics.
Daniel I. Arnon
Biologist
14-Nov-1910 - 20-Dec-1994
Daniel I. Arnon, who added significantly to the understanding of plant photosynthesis, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 84 and lived in nearby Kensington. . .
In 1973 Dr. Arnon won the National Medal of Science for "his fundamental research into the mechanism of green plant utilization of light to produce chemical energy and oxygen and for contributions to our understanding of plant nutrition."
A major contribution was his role in explaining the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the "energy messenger" within living cells. In photosynthesis, such synthesis consists of using light energy to hitch an additional phosphate group (formed of phosphorus, hydrogen and oxygen) to adenosine diphosphate to form energy-rich ATP. The process is a key element of photosynthesis, upon which most life on earth is directly or indirectly dependent.(From his NY Times obituary. For much more on his scientific contributions see NAP.)
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Astronomer
19-Oct-1910 - 21-Aug-1995
Born in Lahore (then India), moved with his family to Madras, then to Cambridge University on scholarship and joined the University of Chicago in 1937. The photo and the bio are from the Noble Prize (Physics 1983) website:
After the early preparatory years, my scientific work has followed a certain pattern motivated, principally, by a quest after perspectives. In practise, this quest has consisted in my choosing (after some trials and tribulations) a certain area which appears amenable to cultivation and compatible with my taste, abilities, and temperament. And when after some years of study, I feel that I have accumulated a sufficient body of knowledge and achieved a view of my own, I have the urge to present my point of view, ab initio, in a coherent account with order, form, and structure.
There have been seven such periods in my life: stellar structure, including the theory of white dwarfs (1929-1939); stellar dynamics, including the theory of Brownian motion (1938-1943); the theory of radiative transfer, including the theory of stellar atmospheres and the quantum theory of the negative ion of hydrogen and the theory of planetary atmospheres, including the theory of the illumination and the polarization of the sunlit sky (1943-1950); hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability, including the theory of the Rayleigh-Bénard convection (1952-1961); the equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, partly in collaboration with Norman R. Lebovitz (1961-1968); the general theory of relativity and relativistic astrophysics (1962-1971); and the mathematical theory of black holes (1974- 1983).
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje*, Macedonia, on August 26**, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months' training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.
On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, "The Missionaries of Charity", whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.
Today the order comprises Active and Contemplative branches of Sisters and Brothers in many countries. In 1963 both the Contemplative branch of the Sisters and the Active branch of the Brothers was founded. In 1979 the Contemplative branch of the Brothers was added, and in 1984 the Priest branch was established. . .
Jacques Cousteau
Scientist 11-Jun-1910 - 25-Jun-1997
Jacques Cousteau was the most famous undersea explorer in the world, known by his dozens of books and films from the 1950s until his death in 1997. The co-inventor of the aqualung (an underwater breathing apparatus) in 1943, Cousteau also pioneered techniques in underwater photography and explored the oceans of the world aboard his vessel Calypso. His filmmaking career included three Oscars, frequent television specials and the series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1966). In his later years Cousteau devoted himself to educating the public on environmental issues, and working with the Cousteau Foundation, founded in 1973 to further marine research and exploration.
A little more from notablebiographies:
Although Cousteau was a sickly child, who the doctors told not to participate in any strenuous activity, he learned to swim and soon developed a passionate love for the sea. He combined this love with an early interest in invention and built a model of a marine crane when he was eleven years old.
In school Cousteau was bored and often misbehaved. He was even expelled at one time. In 1930 Cousteau entered France's naval academy, the Ecole Navale, in Brest. He graduated three years later and then entered the French navy. In 1936 he was given a pair of underwater goggles, the kind used by divers. Cousteau was so impressed with what he saw beneath the sea that he immediately set about designing a device that would allow humans to breath underwater.
This project was put on hold during World War II (1939–45; a war in which England, the Soviet Union, and the United States clashed with Germany, Japan, and Italy). Cousteau became a gunnery (heavy guns) officer and was later awarded the prestigious Legion d'Honneur for his work with the
.
French resistance, a military group fighting against the occupying German army.
Even during the war Cousteau turned his attention to the world below the sea. In 1942 he designed the Aqua-Lung, an early underwater breathing device. Cousteau then helped remove mines from French seas left over from the war. One of these minesweepers (boats used to remove mines from the bottom of the ocean) would become Cousteau's research ship, the Calypso. (Find the rest at notablebiographies; picture by Dick Strandberg from incwell.)
E. G. Marshall
Actor 18-Jun-1910 - 24-Aug-1998
Juror #4, 12 Angry Men
While some websites list him as born in 1910, the ones I'm more likely to trust (and did longer bios) list him as born 1914. So consider this a preview for the 1914 list.
Akira Kurosawa
Film Director 23-Mar-1910 - 6-Sep-1998
Japanese film director, considered with Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu among the greatest of Japanese modern film makers. Kurosawa also collaborated on the scripts of most of his films and edited or closely supervised the editing. Several of Kurosawa's works were adaptations of Western literary works, including Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Gorky's The Lower Depths, Shakespeare's Macbeth (adapted into Throne of Blood) and King Lear (reworked as Ran). The director Steven Spielberg called once Kurosawa "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time."
"I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport - neither of which belonged in a period movie. Only the person who's made the movie knows what goes into the decisions that result in any piece of work." (Sidney Lumet in Making Movies, 1995)
Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo. His father, Isamu Kurosawa, was a veteran army officer who turned athletic instructor. His mother, Shima, came from an Osaka merchant family. She was forty years old when Kurosawa was born. Isamu took often his whole family to the movies, and later Kurosawa said, that his father's attitude toward film encouraged him to become a director. In 1923 Kurosawa entered Keika Junior High School. He began taking Japanese calligraphy lessons and became captain of the school's kendo club. For his father's disappointment, he was not interested in formal training in arts. He also failed to pass the entrance examination of an art school he applied. . .
Kurosawa gained international fame with his great series of films in the 1950s and 1960s, which mixed Eastern and Western styles and established him as one of the world's leading film makers. In 1951 Kurosawa's Rashomon won the first prize at the Venice Film Festivals and a Special Oscar. The production company had been first rather reluctant to submit the film, fearing incomprehension. John McCarten's review in the New Yorker (December 29, 1951) consolidated early fears: "Perhaps I am purblind to the merits of Rashomon, but no matter how enlightened I may become on the art forms of Nippon, I am going to go on thinking that a Japanese potpourri of Erskine Caldwell, Stanislavski, and Harpo Marx isn't likely to provide much sound diversion." The dark tale of a rape of a woman and murder of her husband has been interpreted as a philosophical examination of the nature of objective truth. The Finnish film critic Peter von Bagh wrote in Elämää suuremmat elokuvat (1989) that Rashomon is about narcissism, about ways by which people deceive themselves. Kurosawa himself has said that he wanted to return with this work to the beauty and heritage of the silent film. [Go to Kirjatsu for the whole bio.]
Gus Hall
Activist 8-Oct-1910 13-Oct-2000
Long-time American Communist Party leader. Hall was born Arvo Gus Halberg on October 8, 1910, in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota. His parents were Finnish immigrants who were involved in the IWW and would later be charter members of the Communist Party in 1919. His father, Matt Halberg, recruited him into the Young Communist League (YCL) when he was 17. Working for the YCL, young Arvo traveled to mining towns in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1931, he spent two years at the Lenin Institute in Moscow, learning the political ideology of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders of that period. In the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike (led by Trotskyist Farrell Dobbs), Hall was one of the young activists involved. During this period, he became blacklisted and could not find a job, forcing him to change his name to Gus Hall.
The YCL moved Hall to Ohio where he led the 1937 "Little Steel" strike of Warren-Youngstown. He became a staff member of the Steel Workers of America, and ran for mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, on the Communist Party ticket. He volunteered for the US Navy during World War II and was elected to the Communist Party's National Committee while in the Pacific in 1944. He became a close aide to Eugene Dennis and was consequently elected to the National Executive Board in 1946.
Under the anti-communist Smith Act, Hall was indicted in 1948 and convicted one year later to a five-year prison term. He fled to Mexico and was elected the Communist Party's National Secretary in 1950. In Mexico City, US authorities apprehended Hall in 1951 and was given three additional years of prison time. Upon his release in the 1960's, he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party and worked to rebuild the party after years of devestating decline. He ran for President in 1968 with Charlene Mitchell, but received only 1,075 votes.
As he rebuilt the Communist Party, Hall retained many characteristics of the Party's Stalinist past, and entered the New Left to gain young activists with the YCL (now known as the "W.E.B. DuBois Clubs"). He managed to draw in many young militants with the help of the likes of Charlene Mitchell and Angela Davis. [There's a little more here.]
William Hanna
Cartoonist 14-Jul-1910 22-Mar-2001
The son of a construction superintendent for the Sante Fe railway stations, William Hanna was obliged to move around quite a bit as a youngster. Influenced by the preponderance of professional writers on his mother's side of the family, Hanna gravitated towards the creative arts in high school. He played saxophone in a dance band, then majored in journalism and engineering at Compton (California) Junior College. While looking for work in the early stages of the Depression, he landed a backstage engineering job at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre. Hanna's brother-in-law, who worked for a Hollywood lab called Pacific Title, tipped him off to a job opening at the Harman-Ising cartoon studios. From 1931 onward, Hanna contributed story ideas to Harman-Ising's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series, produced on behalf of Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. He also wrote the music and lyrics for several of the catchy tunes heard in these animated endeavors. When Harman-Ising moved to MGM, they took Hanna along as a story editor. And when MGM formed its own animation department in 1937, Hanna was hired by department head Fred Quimby. [More at fandango]
Sarah McClendon
Journalist 8-Jul-1910 8-Jan-2003
White House Reporter FDR to GWB
From her NY Times obituary:
First mocked in an almost all-male press corps, then scorned as a vocal crank and finally honored as a pioneer, Ms. McClendon was the nation's longest-serving White House reporter, from 1944 to the early days of the current Bush administration. She became celebrated for questions at presidential news conferences that included local concerns in Texas, her home state, and government lapses overlooked by others.
In the 1950's, she identified herself successively as the representative of so many of her small-town newspaper clients that Dwight D. Eisenhower once demanded to know, ''Do you get fired every week?''
Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent recalled: ''She made the veins stand out in Eisenhower's head, because he would get so mad. Sometimes people thought her questions were off the wall, but other times, she hit them right in the eye.'' . . .
She was a single, working mother when that was rare, and on the day of her first Washington assignment she had to plead with a baby sitter to stay overtime. The sitter agreed, and Ms. McClendon made her deadline.
Robert K. Merton
Sociologist
4-Jul-1910 - 23-Feb-2003
Merton, who lived in Manhattan, was an institution at Columbia, joining the faculty in 1941 and helping to build one of the most prominent sociology departments in the world through the relentless pursuit of subtle patterns in society. By concentrating on "middle range" theory -- rather than grand scale or abstract speculation -- Merton established concepts that reached into everyday life. He coined the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy," developed the idea of role models and created, with his colleagues, the "focused interview" that was used in "focus groups" -- now a staple of contemporary business albeit a distortion of Merton's intention.
Merton generated many of his ideas through human interaction and observation. The skillful logic of his findings once inspired Eugene Garfield, an information specialist, to write, "So much of what he says is so absolutely obvious, so transparently true, that one can't imagine why no one else has bothered to point it out."
In 1942, Merton gained much attention when he described the "ethos of science," and the consequences of these values for the behavior of scientists within institutional settings. He portrayed scientists as individuals who had regular motivations, desires and fears, thus offering insight into some of the most elusive and creative minds the world has known.
Often, Merton's work had consequences that pushed beyond the walls of academia, including his study of successfully integrated communities, which helped shape the case of "Brown v. Board of Education," and led to the Supreme Court's ruling to desegregate public schools. His extraordinarily influential work on social structure and anomie built upon research on anomia by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and sought to explain that deviance results from the existence of social structures that dangle universal goals but do not offer all members the opportunity to achieve them.
Economist
29-Dec-1910 - apparently still living as of June 2010
From the beginning of his bio at the Library of Economics and Liberty: Ronald Coase received the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy.” Coase is an unusual economist for the twentieth century, and a highly unusual Nobel Prize winner. First, his writings are sparse. In a sixty-year career he wrote only about a dozen significant papers—and very few insignificant ones. Second, he uses little or no mathematics, disdaining what he calls “blackboard economics.” Yet his impact on economics has been profound. That impact stems almost entirely from two of his articles, one published when he was twenty-seven and the other published twenty-three years later. . .
Here are some more from the original list. At first I just left the links on the website I got the list from, but those bios are pretty limited, so I started finding more interesting links.
Joy Adamson Naturalist
20-Jan-1910 - 3-Jan-1980
Born Free
Momofuku Ando
Business
5-Mar-1910 - 5-Jan-2007
Inventor of instant noodle soup
Paul A. Baran
Economist
8-Dec-1910 - 26-Mar-1964
Marxist economist
Kitty Carlisle
Singer
3-Sep-1910 - 18-Apr-2007
A Night at the Opera
Erich Gimpel - This link takes you to a fascinating story.
Spy
25-Mar-1910 - 1996
Agent 146
Paulette Goddard
Actor and for a time Charlie Chaplin's wife
3-Jun-1910 - 23-Apr-1990
Reap the Wild Wind
Louis Henyey - The numerical technique he developed for the solution of the equations of stellar structure, known worldwide as the Henyey method, resulted in breakthroughs in research and has since become the standard tool in the field.
Astronomer
3-Feb-1910 - 18-Feb-1970
Henyey method
Miguel Hernández
Poet
30-Oct-1910 - 28-Mar-1942
El rayo que no cesa
Sitting upon the dead
fallen silent these two months,
I kiss empty shoes
and make an angry fist
with the heart's hand
and the soul that drives it. . .
Sammy Kaye
Musician
13-Mar-1910 - 2-Jun-1987
Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye
Tjalling C. Koopmans
Nobel Prize winning Economist
28-Aug-1910 - 26-Feb-1985
Linear programming
Frank Loesser
Composer
29-Jun-1910 - 28-Jul-1969
Guys and Dolls
Diosdado Macapagal
Head of State
28-Sep-1910 - 21-Apr-1997
9th President of the Philippines
Archer J. P. Martin
Nobel Prize winning Chemist
1-Mar-1910 - 28-Jul-2002
Partition chromatography
Max Miedinger
Typographer
24-Dec-1910 - 8-Mar-1980
Designed the Helvetica typeface
Jacques Monod
Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine
9-Feb-1910 - 31-May-1976
Operon theory of genetic control
Bonnie Parker
Criminal
1-Oct-1910 - 23-May-1934
Bonnie and Clyde
Louis Prima
Singer
7-Dec-1910 - 24-Aug-1978
King of the Swingers
Edwin O. Reischauer
Diplomat
15-Oct-1910 - 1-Sep-1990
US Ambassador to Japan, 1961-66
Abraham Ribicoff
Politician
9-Apr-1910 - 22-Feb-1998
Senator and Governor from Connecticut
Lillian Roth
Actor
13-Dec-1910 - 12-May-1980
I'll Cry Tomorrow
Bayard Rustin
Activist
17-Mar-1910 - 24-Aug-1987
Organized the 1963 March on Washington
Paul Turan
Mathematician
28-Aug-1910 - 26-Sep-1976
Hungarian mathematician
Robert F. Wagner, Jr.
Politician
20-Apr-1910 - 12-Feb-1991
Mayor of New York City, 1954-65
T-Bone Walker
Guitarist
28-May-1910 - 16-Mar-1975
Highly influential blues guitarist
Howlin' Wolf
Singer/Songwriter
10-Jun-1910 - 10-Jan-1976
Blues guitarist
John Wooden I wrote about Johnny Wooden as part of a post on recent deaths in early June.
Basketball
14-Oct-1910 - 31 May 2010
Winningest-ever college coach
Jane Wyatt
Actor
12-Aug-1910 - 20-Oct-2006
Father Knows Best
Joseph Yablonski
Labor Leader
3-Mar-1910 - 31-Dec-1969
UMW executive, murdered
