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☆ Don Bateman, Trailblazer in Airline Safety, Dies at 91
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-02 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Don Bateman, an engineer who invented a cockpit device that warns airplane pilots with colorful screen displays and dire audible alerts like “Caution Terrain!” and “Pull Up!” when they are in danger of crashing into mountains, buildings or water — an innovation that has likely saved thousands of lives — died on May 21 at his home in Bellevue, Wash. His daughter Katherine McCaslin said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. The ground proximity warning system that Mr. Bateman began working on in the late 1960s, and continued to improve until he retired from Honeywell International in 2016, warns pilots against accidentally slamming into land or water because of poor visibility and bad weather, once the most common cause of airline deaths. That category of plane crash has nearly been eliminated. “Don Bateman and his team have probably saved more lives through safety system technologies than anyone else in aviation history,” Charley Pereira, a former senior aerospace engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board, wrote in an email, estimating the number in the thousands.

Persons: Don Bateman, —, Katherine McCaslin, Bateman, “ Don Bateman, ” Charley Pereira Organizations: Honeywell International, Boeing, National Transportation Safety Locations: Bellevue, Wash

☆ Robin Wagner, Visionary Set Designer of Broadway Hits, Dies at 89
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer of more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to be racing toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca strapped to the front of it, died on Monday at his home in New York City. His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She did not say in what borough he lived. Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower that was raked upward to the back in a delicate curve.

Persons: Robin Wagner, Coca, Christie Wagner Lee, Wagner, Clive Barnes, ”, Christ, ” “ Young, Tony Kushner’s Organizations: Broadway, Americas, The New York Times Locations: New York City, The, America

☆ Stanley Engerman, Revisionist Scholar of Slavery, Dies at 87
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“We thought there’d be a lot of discussion within the history profession for a while, but the public reaction is something else,” Professor Engerman told The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester in May 1974. What is interesting is that such a conclusion is now necessary to convince white people.”Several months after “Time on the Cross” was published, about 100 historians, economists and sociologists gathered for a three-day conference to discuss the book at the University of Rochester, where Professor Engerman and Professor Fogel taught. The debate was so contentious that The Democrat and Chronicle described it as “scholarly warfare.” Some of the criticism focused on the two men’s emphasis on statistics over the brutal realities of slavery. “They deny the slave his voice, his initiative and his humanity,” the historian Kenneth M. Stampp said at the conference. “They reject the untidy world in which masters and slaves, with their rational and irrational perceptions, survived as best they could, and replace it with a model of a tidy, rational world that never was.”But the Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese, whose own book about slavery, “Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slave Made,” was also published in 1974, called “Time on the Cross” an “important work” that had “broken open a lot of questions about issues that were swept under the rug before.”

Persons: there’d, Engerman, Fogel —, Douglass C, —, Kenneth B, Clark, “, Toni Morrison, Fogel, Kenneth M, Stampp, Eugene D, Genovese, Jordan, ” Organizations: New York Times Magazine, University of Rochester Locations: Rochester

☆ Superstar Billy Graham, Model of the Buff, Blond Wrestler, Dies at 79
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Superstar Billy Graham, a professional wrestler whose extravagant presence — 22-inch biceps, dyed blond hair, feather boas, tie-dyed tights and an outrageous gift of gab — influenced the style of future stars like Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura, died on Wednesday in Phoenix. The cause was sepsis and multiple organ failure, said Keith Elliot Greenberg, who collaborated with Graham on his autobiography. Graham’s longtime use of steroids had weakened his bones, requiring at least six hip replacements, and made him sterile. He also received a liver transplant in 2002 after contracting hepatitis C.“If you look at those that came after him, more people have patterned themselves after Superstar Billy Graham and become a success in this business than probably anybody,” Triple H, the superstar wrestler whose birth name is Paul Levesque, said at Graham’s induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2004. “And when it comes to bodies, there was nobody, and I mean nobody, that could touch the Superstar.”Graham, who was born Eldridge Wayne Coleman, had been an evangelist, a bodybuilder who bench pressed as much as 605 pounds, a defensive end in the Canadian Football League, a debt collector and a bouncer before turning to wrestling in 1970.

☆ Bill Saluga, a Memorable Comedic Wiseguy, Is Dead at 85
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Raymond J. Johnson Jr. was a wiseguy, dressed in a zoot suit and a wide-brimmed fedora and waving a cigar in his right hand. “Ohhhh, you doesn’t have to call me Johnson,” he would say. Jr.“But you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”And you can call his creator Bill Saluga. Mr. Saluga also played Johnson on various television series; on a disco record (“Dancin’ Johnson”); and, most memorably, in commercials for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer. In 1979, at the peak of Mr. Saluga’s fame as a comedic one-hit wonder, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that “now everybody and his brother are doing Saluga impressions throughout this very impressionable land of ours.”

☆ Adam Brace, Director of Ambitious One-Person Shows, Dies at 43
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-07 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“He looked after so much more than the jokes and the laughs,” said the American comedian Alex Edelman, whose show “Just for Us” is scheduled to begin performances at the Hudson Theater on June 22, after an Obie Award-winning run Off Broadway. It was also staged in London and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the annual performing arts extravaganza. He’d take these personal stories and translate them into accessible shows.”“Just for Us” tells the story of how Mr. Edelman, after drawing the attention of white nationalists online, decided to infiltrate a group of them in Queens. It was nominated for an Olivier Award for best entertainment or comedy play and will open Off Broadway, at the Greenwich House Theater, next month. “With my show, he changed everything,” Ms. Kingsman, an Australian-born actor and writer, said by phone.

☆ Katie Cotton, Who Helped Raise Apple’s Profile, Dies at 57
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Katie Cotton, who as Apple’s longtime communications chief guarded the media’s access to Steve Jobs, the company’s visionary co-founder, and helped organize the introduction of many of his products, died on April 6 in Redwood City, Calif. She was 57. Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Michael Mimeles, her former husband. He did not give a cause but said that she had experienced complications from heart surgery she underwent a few years ago. Ms. Cotton, who built a culture of mystery by saying relatively little, if anything, to reporters, joined Apple in 1996 and began working with Mr. Jobs the next year, soon after he returned to the company after 12 years away. Apple was in poor financial shape at the time, but Ms. Cotton worked with Mr. Jobs to engineer a striking turnaround.

☆ Jerry Mander, Adman for Radical Causes, Dies at 86
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

His son Kai confirmed the death but did not provide a cause. In 1966, Mr. Mander was working at Freeman & Gossage, an advertising agency in San Francisco, when David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, asked for help in framing the conservation group’s opposition to the federal government’s construction of hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River. The full-page newspaper ads created by the agency grabbed national attention and angered proponents of the project in Congress, who denied the Sierra Club’s claims that the dams would flood and desecrate the canyon. “Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon From Being Flooded … For Profit,” read the headline of one of the ads written by Mr. Mander. It included coupons with messages that readers could clip and send to public officials, including to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior.

☆ Charles Stanley, Atlanta Pastor Who Preached to the World, Dies at 90
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Charles Stanley, an influential Baptist pastor who for more than 50 years preached a conservative message from his Atlanta megachurch, through an extensive network of television and radio stations, and in many books, died on Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. In Touch Ministries, Dr. Stanley’s nonprofit organization, announced his death but did not state a cause. As the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Stanley was known as one of the leading American preachers of his time, alongside figures like the Rev. He was also a board member of the Moral Majority, the right-wing religious organization, and a close friend of its founder, the Rev. “Evangelicals just loved him,” Barry Hankins, a professor of history at Baylor University who, with Thomas Kidd, wrote “Baptists in America” (2015), said in a phone interview.

☆ Jessica Burstein, Whose Camera Captured New York, Dies at 76
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Richard Sandomir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Jessica Burstein, a photographer who in extended assignments captured three quintessentially New York institutions — the “Law & Order” television franchise, the new Yankee Stadium as it was being built and the restaurant and celebrity hangout Elaine’s — died on April 11 at her home in Manhattan. The cause was lung cancer, her sister Patricia Burstein said. In 1992, Ms. Burstein became the official photographer at Elaine’s, the night spot on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where writers, athletes, actors, politicians and filmmakers gathered in a salon overseen by the imperious owner, Elaine Kaufman. Ms. Burstein came as she pleased, with her only tangible reward the display of her framed pictures on a restaurant wall (Ms. Kaufman did not pay her). She also crafted striking tableside portraits of luminaries like Liza Minnelli and William Styron.

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