Bernice Gera (1931 - 1992)

Bernice Shiner Gera (June 15, 1931 – September 23, 1992) was the first female umpire in professional baseball.  Born in Ernest, Pennsylvania, Gera loved baseball as a child, but never considered a career in baseball until she was already in her mid thirties, married, and working as a secretary. According to a Time Magazine article, […]

Nancy Walker (1922 - 1992)

Walker was born in 1922 as Anna Myrtle Swoyer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder of two daughters of vaudevillian Dewey Barto (né Stewart Steven Swoyer; 1896–1973) and Myrtle (née Lawler; died January 2, 1931). Walker and her father both stood 4’11” (1.50 m). Anna’s younger sister, Betty Lou (born August 17, 1930), also had a […]

Bobbi Kristina Brown (1993 - 2015)

Bobbi Kristina Brown Bobbi Kristina Brown, 22, the only daughter of singers Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, died Sunday, nearly six months after she was found unresponsive in a bathtub of her home, her family said. Brown has been unresponsive in hospitals and hospice care since she was found in a bathtub of her Roswell, […]

Red Grange (1903 - 1991)

“Red” Grange was born on June 13, 1903 in Forksville, a village of about 200 people in an area of Pennsylvania lumber camps. His father was the foreman of three lumber camps. For a number of years, the Grange family lived with relatives until they could finally afford a home of their own in Wheaton, […]

Edwin Land (1909 - 1991)

Edwin Land was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Matha (Goldfaden) and Harry Land, owner of a scrap metal yard. Land’s parents were of Eastern European Jewish descent. Land attended the Norwich Free Academy at Norwich, Connecticut, a semi-private high school, and graduated in the class of 1927. The library there was posthumously named for him, […]

Bob Welch (1945 - 2012)

Bob Welch was a key member of the pop group Fleetwood Mac in the early 1970s before scoring several minor hits as a solo performer, died June 7 at his home in Nashville. He was 65. According to police, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He left a suicide note. Mr. Welch was a […]

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver’s license and had never driven a car. He was born Ray Douglas Bradbury on […]

Robin Gibb (1949 - 2012)

Robin Gibb Robin Gibb, one-third of the Bee Gees, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his spokesperson has confirmed via a statement. Gibb was 62 years old. “The family of Robin Gibb, of the Bee Gees, announce with great sadness that Robin passed away today following his long battle with cancer and intestinal surgery,” […]

Margaret Suckley (1891 - 1991)

Suckley was born December 20, 1891, at Wilderstein, the family home of Robert Bowne Suckley and Elizabeth Philips Montgomery in the Hudson Valley. She was the fourth of seven children, and a sixth cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Generally called “Daisy” by those close to her, Suckley grew up at Wilderstein, where she was a […]

Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991)

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up there by her divorced mother. She attended the Ohio State University, but left in early 1918.  In 1918 she moved with friends from OSU to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she was ‘adopted’ by the anarchist Hippolyte Havel. She shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with […]

Martha Graham (1894 - 1991)

Graham was born in Allegheny City – later to became part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – in 1894. Her father George Graham practiced as what in the Victorian era was known as an “alienist”, a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. The Grahams were strict Presbyterians. Dr. Graham was a third-generation American of Irish descent. […]

Lee Remick (1935 - 1991)

Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin “Frank” Remick, who owned a department store. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Duffield, was an English-born preacher and her paternal grandfather was of Irish ancestry. Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, The Hewitt School and studied acting […]

Donald Dunn (1941 - 2012)

Donald Dunn As the bass player on dozens of the most soulful hits in the history of pop music, Donald “Duck” Dunn often found himself out on the road playing to fans who had assumed he was black like the stars he supported, notably Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave. When audiences encountered […]

George Lindsey (1928 - 2012)

George Lindsey George Lindsey, the actor who portrayed the country-bumpkin mechanic Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show,” died Sunday after a brief illness, his family said. He was 83. Lindsey’s character Goober Pyle joined the hit sitcom in 1964 as the cousin of Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors. When the show ended four […]

Dick Clark (1929 - 2012)

Dick Clark Host and TV producer Dick Clark has died. He was 82. Spokesman Paul Shefrin said the “American Bandstand” creator had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica, a day after he was admitted for an outpatient procedure. Long dubbed “the world’s oldest teenager” because of his boyish appearance, […]

Jonathan Frid (1924 - 2012)

Jonathan Frid Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected — and by his own account unwanted — celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the sanguinary soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died last Saturday, April 14, in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. He died from complications of a fall, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played […]

Halston (1932 - 1990)

Roy Halston Frowick was born on April 23, 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, the second son of a Norwegian-American accountant James and his seamstress wife Hallie. Halston developed an interest in sewing from his mother, and he began creating hats and altering clothes for his mother and sister as a boy. He graduated Benjamin Bosse […]

Alberto Moravia (1907 - 1990)

Alberto Pincherle (the pen-name “Moravia” was the surname of his paternal grandmother) was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish Venetian father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic Anconitan mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was of Dalmatian origin.  The family he was born in had […]

Reinaldo Arenas (1943 - 1990)

Arenas was born in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and, later, in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and […]

Alice Marble (1913 - 1990)

Born in the small town of Beckwourth, Plumas County, California, Marble moved with her family at the age of five to San Francisco. A tomboy, she excelled in many sports, including baseball; but her brother persuaded her to try the more ladylike tennis. She quickly mastered the game, playing in Golden Gate Park. She suffered […]

Pearl Bailey (1918 - 1990)

Bailey was born in Southampton County in southeastern Virginia, to Joseph and Ella Mae Ricks Bailey. She was reared in the Bloodfields neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia.  She made her stage-singing debut when she was 15 years old. Her brother Bill Bailey was beginning his own career as a tap dancer, and suggested she enter […]

Ronnie Montrose (1947 - 2012)

Ronnie Montrose It wasn’t prostate cancer that killed guitar legend Ronnie Montrose. He beat that gremlin into the dirt, as he did so many obstacles to his career and musical expression. But Montrose, who was immensely proud of being a “survivor,” simply couldn’t vanquish the clinical depression that plagued him since he was a toddler. […]

Sheldon Moldoff (1920 - 2012)

Sheldon Moldoff Shelly was much in demand throughout the forties, working for DC on many strips.  One of his favorites was one he created — The Black Pirate, featured in Action Comics. In 1953, he became Bob Kane’s main ghost and I guess I need to explain that working arrangement… Kane never drew Batman on […]

Paulette Goddard (1910 - 1990)

Goddard was the only child of Joseph Russell Levy (1881–1954), who was Jewish, and the son of a prosperous cigar manufacturer from Salt Lake City, and of Alta Mae Goddard (1887–1983), who was Episcopalian and of English heritage. They married in 1908 and separated while their daughter was very young, although the divorce did not […]

Lina Romay (1954 - 2012)

Lina Romay Romay was born Rosa Maria Almirall on June 25, 1954, in Barcelona, Cataluna, Spain. Her cinematic pseudonym was taken from a singer/actress in mambo king Xavier Cugat‘s band in the 1940s. Following graduation from high school, Romay studied the arts, married actor/photographer Raymond Hardy (they later divorced), and began acting in stage productions. […]

Elyse Knox (1917 - 2012)

Elyse Knox As a B-movie actress in the 1940s, Elyse Knox was perhaps best known for the only horror film she ever made, “The Mummy’s Tomb,” with Lon Chaney Jr. as the monster who kidnaps her. She later recalled working through the night on the abduction and graveyard scenes with Chaney, miserable in heavy makeup […]

Mary Martin (1913 - 1990)

Martin was born in Weatherford, Texas. Her life as a child, as she describes it in her autobiography My Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both her mother and father, as well as her siblings. Her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds. […]

Keith Haring (1958 - 1990)

Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother Joanne Haring, and father Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. Haring became interested in art at a very early age spending time with his father […]

Robert Hegyes (1951 - 2012)

Robert Hegyes who played Juan Epstein, the Sweathog voted Most Likely to Take a Life, on the 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter,” died on Thursday in Edison, N.J. He was 60. The cause was cardiac arrest, a spokesman for John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Edison, where Mr. Hegyes was pronounced dead, told Reuters. Broadcast […]

Bob Weston (1947 - 2012)

Bob Weston The long-lasting pop band Fleetwood Mac is also one of the most controversial, its several changes of style and personnel often arising from romantic entanglements rather than musical differences. Bob Weston, who has died aged 64 of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage and cirrhosis of the liver, was the band’s lead guitarist in the early […]