Jerry Wolman (1927 - 2013)

Wolman was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of a grocer. He worked in the family business into his high school years, when his father had a stroke. Not graduating, Wolman joined the Merchant Marines, returned home, and moved to Washington, D.C. In the 1950s, he began his own construction […]

Ruth Asawa (1926 - 2013)

Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, one of seven children. Her father operated a truck farm until the Japanese American internment during World War II. The family lived in the assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of 1942, then at Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.  Following her graduation from […]

Art Donovan (1924 - 2013)

Art Donovan, born June 5, 1924, was the son of Arthur Donovan, Sr., a famed boxing referee, and the grandson of Professor Mike Donovan, the world middleweight boxing champion in the 1870s.  Art attended Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx. He received a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in 1942 but left […]

Julius L. Chambers (1936 - 2013)

Chambers grew up during the Jim Crow era in rural Montgomery County, North Carolina. As a child, Chambers saw first hand the effects of discrimination when his father’s auto repair business became a target of racial injustice in 1948. A white customer refused to pay his father and his father could not afford a lawyer […]

Dick Kazmaier (1930 - 2013)

Kazmaier was born November 23, 1930, in Toledo, Ohio, the only child of Richard and Marian Kazmaier. He graduated from Maumee High School in Ohio in 1948. He played football (four years), basketball (four years), track and field (four years), baseball (four years) and golf (one year) earning a letter each year in each sport. […]

Ruth Maleczech (1939 - 2013)

Maleczech was born in Cleveland, Ohio as Ruth Sophia Reinprecht to Yugoslavian immigrant parents, a steel worker and a seamstress and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  Maleczech was the first in her family to attend college, beginning theater studies at UCLA at 16. From there she went to San Francisco to work, first, with Herbert Blau […]

Bob Kurland (1924 - 2013)

Kurland was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Albert and Adele Kurland. He graduated from Jennings High School in Jennings, Missouri, where he participated in basketball and track.  Kurland, a Missouri native, considered attending the University of Missouri. But when Oklahoma A&M played a game at Saint Louis University, A&M coach Henry Iba invited Kurland […]

L. C. Greenwood (1946 - 2013)

Greenwood was born in Canton, Mississippi. He graduated from Arkansas AM&N (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), where he became a member of the Beta Theta Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. He was also named the 1968 Ebony All-American defensive lineman in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC).  Greenwood was drafted by the Pittsburgh […]

Harold Agnew (1921 - 2013)

Harold Melvin Agnew was born in Denver, Colorado on March 28, 1921, the only child of a pair of stonecutters. He attended South Denver High School, and entered the University of Denver, where he majored in chemistry. He was a strong athlete who pitched for the university softball that won a championship. He left the […]

Alvaro Mutis (1923 - 2013)

Mutis was born in Bogotá and lived in Brussels from the age of two until eleven, where his father, Santiago Mutis Dávila, held a post as a diplomat. They would return to Colombia by ship for summer holidays. During this time Mutis’ family stayed at his grandfather’s coffee and sugar cane plantation, Coello. For Álvaro […]

David Hubel (1926 - 2013)

Hubel was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents in 1926. His paternal grandfather emigrated as a child to the United States from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. In 1929, his family moved to Montreal, where he spent his formative years. His father was a chemical engineer and Hubel developed a keen interest in […]

Carolyn Cassady (1923 - 2013)

The youngest of five siblings, she was born in Lansing, Michigan. Of English descent, both of her parents were educators, her mother a former English teacher and her father a biochemist, who raised their children according to strict conventional values. She spent the first eight years of her childhood in East Lansing, then the family […]

Ken Norton (1943 - 2013)

Ken Norton Norton was an outstanding athlete at Jacksonville High School. He was a member of the state championship football team and was selected to the all-state team on defense as a senior in 1960. His track coach entered him in eight events, and Norton placed first in seven of them. As a result, the […]

Eiji Toyoda (1913 - 2013)

Toyoda studied mechanical engineering at Tokyo Imperial University from 1933 to 1936.  During this time his cousin Kiichiro established an automobile plant at the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in the city of Nagoya in central Japan. Toyoda joined his cousin in the plant at the conclusion of his degree and throughout their lives they shared […]

Leonard Herzenberg (1931 - 2013)

Herzenberg was born in New York City, U.S.A.. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College in biology and chemistry. In 1955, he received his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in biochemistry with a specialization in immunology for studies on cytochrome in Neurospora.  After school he was a postdoctoral fellow at the […]

Arthur Danto (1924 - 2013)

Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 1, 1924, and grew up in Detroit.  After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright […]

Paul Reichmann (1930 - 2013)

Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930 to Samuel Reichmann, a wealthy egg merchant and his wife Renée. His parents were Orthodox Jews from a small town in Hungary, but his father had risen to prominence in Vienna as a successful merchant. Paul was the fifth of six children. The family escaped the Nazi occupation […]

Bill Sharman (1926 - 2013)

Sharman completed high school in the Southern California city of Porterville, California. He served during World War II from 1944 to 1946 in the US Navy, and was a graduate of the University of Southern California. He played 1st base on the 1948 USC Trojan’s College World Series championship team. Following his senior year, Sharman […]

Deborah Turbeville (1932 - 2013)

Deborah Lou Turbeville (July 6, 1932 – October 24, 2013) was an American fashion photographer. She is widely credited with adding a darker, more brooding element to fashion photography, beginning in the early 1970s. Turbeville is one of just three photographers, together with Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, who essentially changed fashion photo shoots from […]

Bill Mazer (1920 - 2013)

Mazer’s family left Kiev, emigrating before his first birthday. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Yeshiva University High School for Boys, he received a BA at University of Michigan for premed before being drafted. During World War II, he served the majority of his time in the Armed Forces-Air Force Transport […]

Lawrence Klein (1920 - 2013)

Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Blanche (née Monheit) and Leo Byron Klein. He went on to graduate from Los Angeles City College, where he learned calculus; the University of California, Berkeley, where he began his computer modeling and earned a B.A. in Economics in 1942; he earned his Ph.D. in Economics […]

Scott Carpenter (1925 - 2013)

Born in Boulder, Colorado, Carpenter moved to New York City with his parents Marion Scott Carpenter and Florence [née Noxon] Carpenter for the first two years of his life. His father had been awarded a postdoctoral research post at Columbia University. In the summer of 1927, Scott returned to Boulder with his mother, then ill […]

Stanley Kauffmann (1916 - 2013)

Kauffmann started with The New Republic in 1958 and contributed film criticism to that magazine for the next fifty-five years, publishing his last review in 2013. He had one brief break in his New Republic tenure, when he served as the drama critic for the New York Times for eight months in 1966.  He worked […]

Andy Pafko (1921 - 2013)

Pafko grew up in Boyceville, Wisconsin. The small village did not have a baseball team. Pafko was signed as a 19-year-old by the Class D baseball team in nearby Eau Claire. Pafko learned about the interest from team manager Ivy Griffin while working on his father’s farm. “I still remember the day he pulled into […]

Paul Desmarais (1927 - 2013)

Desmarais was born in Sudbury, Ontario to lawyer Jean-Noel Desmarais and Lebea Laforest. The Desmarais family is originally from Quebec and descended from Paul Desmarais who moved to Canada from Saint-Sauveur, France.  Desmarais’ grandfather Noël Desmarais founded the town of Noëlville, Ontario. Desmarais was married to Jacqueline Maranger, also from Sudbury. They had two sons: […]

Ruth Benerito (1916 - 2013)

Ruth Mary Rogan was born and raised in New Orleans. In an age when girls did not usually go on to higher education, her father made sure his daughters received the same education available to boys. She completed high school at age 14 and entered Sophie Newcomb College at age 15, and later Tulane University […]

Tabu Ley Rochereau (1937 - 2013)

Pascal-Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu was born in Bagata, in the then Belgian Congo. His musical career took off in 1956 when he sung with Joseph “Le Grand Kallé” Kabasele, and his band L’African Jazz. After finishing high school he joined the band as a full-time musician. Tabu Ley sang in the pan-African hit Indépendance Cha Cha […]

Saul Leiter (1923 - 2013)

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a well known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a Rabbi. His mother gave him hist first camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. He had developed an early interest […]

Chico Hamilton (1921 - 2013)

Hamilton was born in Los Angeles, California. His brother was the actor Bernie Hamilton.  Hamilton started his career in a band with Charles Mingus, Illinois Jacquet, Ernie Royal, Dexter Gordon, Buddy Collette and Jack Kelso. Engagements with Lionel Hampton, Slim & Slam, T-Bone Walker, Lester Young, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Barnet, Billy Eckstine, Nat […]

Peter B. Lewis (1933 - 2013)

Lewis was raised in a Jewish family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the oldest of four children born to Helen and Joseph Lewis. His father — who had co-founded a small auto insurance company named Progressive Insurance with Jack Green in 1937 — was grooming Lewis to work at the company when he died at age […]