Search for celebrities on Ancestry.com!September 26, 2003
Jerry Hash, beloved husband, father and friend, died at home Monday of congestive heart failure. He was 68.
September 25, 2003
Manley Smith
Manley Colmand Smith, a 60-year resident of Petaluma and a landscaper with a vast knowledge of plants, died of heart failure Saturday. He was 81.
"He enjoyed making things grow," said his son, Raymond Smith of Petaluma. "He could look at any plant and tell you if it was sick or not. He could even tell you what was the front and the back of a tree."
Smith was born in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, but moved with his family to Sonora and graduated from high school there in 1942. He served in the Army during World War II, spending most of his time in the Pacific Theater. He was awarded the World War II Victory Medal, the Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal and the American Campaign Medal.
While in the service, he began writing letters to the sister of one of his buddies, and she later became his wife. He ended his military career in 1946, when he was serving as a military police officer at Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. He marriage his wife, Lavon, in September of that year.
The couple settled in nearby Petaluma, where Smith had his own landscaping business for many years. He collected books on pruning, landscaping and gardening, and he had such a green thumb he could make even orchids grow like weeds, Raymond Smith said.
"He was constantly active," Raymond Smith said. One of his father's customers had a large estate with 7 acres in gardens. "He took care of all 7 acres by himself, and when he left them I understand it took seven people to do his job."
He was an active member and past commander of the American Legion Post No. 28, and was a past chef de gare of the legion's elite "40/8" organization. He helped the American Legion raise money for its community projects, and he marched in its parades.
He was in a deer-hunting club with his son for about 40 years, eventually becoming the club's oldest member. "In our family, hunting is in our blood," Raymond Smith said.
About four years ago, Manley Smith had quadruple bypass heart surgery, and he never fully recovered, his son said.
In addition to his son and wife, Smith is survived by a daughter, Lanora Dunlap of Petaluma; two brothers, George Deckert of the San Andreas area and Clifford Smith of the Los Angeles area; and a grandson.
A funeral service is set for 9 a.m. today at Parent-Sorensen Mortuary, Magnolia Avenue and Keokuk Street, Petaluma. Burial will be in Cypress Hill Memorial Park in Petaluma.
Donations may be made in his memory to Hospice of Petaluma, 416 Payran St., Petaluma 94952 or to the American Legion, Petaluma Post No. 28, P.O. Box 618, Petaluma 94954-0618.
Sonora Carver, 99, rode diving horses
PLEASANTVILLE, N.J. -- Sonora Webster Carver, the first woman to ride the diving horses at Steel Pier in Atlantic City and the inspiration for the 1991 Disney movie "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken," has died. She was 99.
Carver died Sunday at a nursing home, where she resided for several years.
In 1924, she made history when she plummeted 40 feet on horseback into a tank of water. The stunt was first performed by W.F. "Doc" Carver, who became her father-in-law. In 1931, she went blind from detached retinas suffered after one of her horses, Red Lips, hit the water off balance.
Carver continued to ride the high-diving horses until World War II.
The diving horse act was a popular attraction at the pier before being discontinued in the 1970s after complaints from animal rights activists. But Carver insisted the horses loved the dives and were not forced to jump, according to Atlantic City historian Allen Pergament.
Her 1961 autobiography, "A Girl and Five Brave Horses," was the inspiration for the Disney film.
Hugh Gregg, 85, ex-N.H. governor
CONCORD, N.H. -- Former Gov. Hugh Gregg, a member of the state's Republican upper crust and father of Sen. Judd Gregg, died Wednesday at 85.
Gregg, who served a single term from 1953 to 1955, died at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon after a brief illness.
Rising from alderman-at-large to mayor of his hometown of Nashua, Gregg became at age 34 New Hampshire's youngest governor.
He was a moderate Republican who based his administration on the notion that only growth could keep New Hampshire's tax rates down.
He did not seek re-election after his single term, but made a comeback attempt in 1960 and lost.
Gregg published three books -- two on New Hampshire's presidential primary, traditionally the first primary of the political season.
Gregg graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School. He served in the Korean War with the Army Counter Intelligence Corps and was a counterintelligence instructor at Fort Holabird, Md.
He co-founded a law firm in Nashua, but a larger part of his career was devoted to his family's millwork, banking and manufacturing businesses.
September 2, 2003
David Lee Gram
David Lee Gram, a longtime Sebastopol resident whose life was a colorful mosaic of carnivals, top secret Navy work and poker parlors, died Aug. 26 at the age of 72.
Gram's family held a private gathering at a Sebastopol pizza parlor where they shared the father of seven's favorite meal of a pepperoni pizza and Budweiser beer.
As a general contractor, a job he held later in life, Gram worked on projects ranging from the construction of freeways to small Sebastopol eateries.
He also spent many hours at Sonoma Joe's Card Room, which he jokingly referred to as his "office."
When it came to poker, he was smarter than he was lucky, said his oldest daughter, Kathleen Gram-Gavin of Sebastopol.
She said Gram got his name on the board of weekly and daily winners only twice or so in nearly 30 years playing at Sonoma Joe's, which Gram helped remodel.
"He'd get a straight flush and somebody else would bet a royal flush," Gram-Gavin said. "That's how it was, but he could play."
Gram was luckier when it came to family life. He had 7 children, 26 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
His own father left the family shortly after Gram was born on Feb. 25, 1931 in Hammond, Ind.
"He was the best dad for somebody who never had a dad," Gram-Gavin said.
When he was a boy, Gram and his older brother traveled the country with their mother setting up carnivals. They eventually settled in Grand Junction, Colo., where Gram loved to play at the railroad tracks.
One day at the tracks he set eyes on Luseen Lawrence, the prettiest girl he ever saw. The pair were marriage several years later when Lawrence turned 16.
After a stint in the U.S. Army, Gram reunited with his wife in California and went to work at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. He stayed there for 15 years before transferring to a station in Seal Beach.
The family moved to Sebastopol in the early '70s after Gram's retirement from the civil service. He started his own general contracting firm while honing his skills at the poker table.
Gram was also an avid reader and wrote science fiction stories. And according to his daughter, he never met a person he didn't like.
"It didn't matter if you were a friend or family, he'd always say you were always my favorite," Gram-Gavin said.
His wife preceded him in death in 1992.
In addition to his daughter Kathleen, Gram is survived by sons, Mark Gram of Lake Havasu, Ariz., David Gram of Ukiah and Mike Gram of Graton; and daughters, Dianne Fransen of Ukiah, Pamela Chiriboga of Hopland and Linda Lewis of Santa Rosa.
No services were held at Gram's request.
Pleasant Hills Memorial Park in Sebastopol was in charge of arrangements.
Jack Eisner, Holocaust survivor
Jack P. Eisner, who used his Warsaw, Poland, ghetto black-market skills to make a fortune as a legitimate American importer-exporter and then used the fortune to tell how he survived the Holocaust, has died. He was 77.
Eisner died Aug. 24 at New York's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of colon cancer. He had homes in Manhattan, Israel and the south of France.
Eisner founded and served as president of the Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation which, among other educational projects, endows chairs at various universities to spread the story of the Holocaust.
Eisner was 13 and had a scholarship to the Warsaw Music Conservatory when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The boy organized a group of youths to smuggle food and supplies between the Aryan world outside and the Warsaw ghetto. Becoming more militant, he smuggled arms for the ghetto's revolt that started April 19, 1943, and estimated that he personally heaved 200 Molotov cocktails.
Eventually captured by Nazis, young Eisner survived a succession of concentration camps -- Majdanek, Budzyn and Flossenburg -- while more than 100 of his family members, including all 30 of his first cousins, perished.
September 1, 2003
John Hoag
Longtime Healdsburg resident John Hoag, who found a second career as a grape grower after retiring as an optometrist, has died. He was 89.
Hoag, who died Aug. 22, moved to Healdsburg in the early 1970s, drawn by the prospect of growing grapes. He took viticulture classes and eventually became part owner of a Dry Creek vineyard after he retired, according to his daughter, Elizabeth Cleaveland.
"He had a whole new life after he retired," she said.
Hoag took delight in exploring many new areas, learning to speak Spanish so he could talk to workers, taking up photography, and researching the history of his adopted home of Healdsburg.
He even researched the history of the house he bought with his wife, Carla Hoag. He learned that it was once a nursery and was known as the "Camellia House" for the many camellia trees on the property.
"This year we opened his house for the local education council, and he loved it," Cleaveland said. "He had researched the house and gardens and was telling the historian for the Healdsburg Historical Association about it. He loved every bit of it."
Hoag was born and raised on a farm in Mount Vernon, Wash., living on an island but never learning to swim, his daughter said. He went to UC Berkeley, earning his doctorate in 1938 and opening a practice in Mill Valley. He was a member of Rotary International for 60 years.
To his friends and family, Hoag was known for his trademark baseball caps and doting on his cat, Kate, which he got after his wife died in 1998. He is also remembered for his love of talking on the phone with relatives, telling stories about the family.
"He was the kindest man I ever met," Cleaveland said.
Besides his daughter, Hoag is survived by a son, David Hoag, two brothers, and six grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
John Lansdale Jr., Manhattan Project security chief, 91
John Lansdale Jr., the head of security for the Manhattan Project who helped lead U.S. forces to Germany's atomic bomb project before Soviet forces could reach it, died on Aug. 22 at his home near Annapolis, Md. He was 91.
In April 1945, as Allied and Soviet troops were pushing through Germany on their way toward Berlin, top American officials began a mission, known as Alsos, to track down Germany's atomic bomb project and its nuclear scientists before they could fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.
Lansdale, an Army lieutenant colonel who was in charge of intelligence and security for the American project to develop nuclear weapons, had been chosen by the project's director, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, to lead a strike on a factory in Stassfurt in northern Germany, where Groves suspected the Germans had a cache of bomb materials.
On April 17, Lansdale and his team raided the plant and found about 1,100 tons of ore, some in the form of uranium oxide, a basic material of atomic bombs. In less than a week, the Alsos mission had also captured several prominent German atomic scientists, including Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn.
The story of Alsos was chronicled in Richard Rhodes' book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," published in 1986.
In the mid-1950s, at the height of American anti-communist fervor, Lansdale was called before Congress to testify about a decision he had made 10 years earlier to approve the appointment of J. Robert Oppenheimer as head of the Manhattan Project's scientific team.
Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist and branded a security risk by the government, and his security clearance was revoked. Lansdale, outraged by Oppenheimer's treatment, ardently defended him as a loyal American citizen in the congressional hearings and continued to do so for the rest of his life, said his daughter Sally Lansdale.
Born in Oakland, John Lansdale Jr. earned his bachelor's degree from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from Harvard.
In 1936 he went to work for Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, first in Cleveland and later in Washington. He remained with the firm until his retirement in 1987, aside from his military service.
In 1995, Lansdale added a surprising twist to the story of the surrender of the Nazi submarine U-234 to American forces in May 1945. Bound for Tokyo, the submarine was carrying 10 containers filled with uranium oxide. For years, historians had wondered what the American military did with it.
In an interview with the New York Times in 1995, Lansdale said the material, originally intended for Japan's atomic program, instead ended up in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Lansdale's wife of 65 years, Metta Virginia Tomlinson, died in 2001.
He is survived by five daughters, Helen Lansdale of Oregon City, Ore.; Chloe Lansdale Pitard of Philadelphia; Mary Lansdale Hartmann of Millville, Del.; Metta T. Lansdale Jr. of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Sally Lansdale of Omaha, Neb.; 10 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
Frank MacDonald, WWI veteran, 107
HOBART, Australia -- Frank MacDonald, Australia's oldest World War I veteran at 107 and a decorated war hero, was given a state funeral in his hometown in Tasmania state.
MacDonald died last week from pneumonia.
One of 11 children, MacDonald served with the all-Tasmanian 40th Battalion Australian Infantry Force on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918.
He was awarded a medal for "conspicuous gallantry" in Belgium in 1917, and received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1998.
MacDonald's death leaves just six known Australian World War I veterans, all of them over 100 years old.
July 31, 2003
June Lewek
June Belcher Lewek, a one-time shipyard welder and waitress who completed her education later in life and became the Sonoma County law librarian, died Monday at her home in Santa Rosa. She was 78.
The cause was complications related to congestive heart failure, family members said.
Lewek ran the county law library, which is funded by court fees and open to the public as well as legal professionals, from 1977-84, overseeing a period of rapid growth.
"She was really an outstanding law librarian," said Lloyd von der Mehden, a retired Sonoma County Superior Court judge. "The library really prospered under her guidance."
Lewek was born June Belcher on Feb. 25, 1925, in Oakland. Raised in Daly City, she left high school after her junior year to go to work.
She moved to Oregon with her first husband. Soon after the birth of her first daughter, Madeline, she took a job as a wartime welder in a Portland shipyard, working on ships being made for the U.S. Navy.
The family returned to the Bay Area, where Lewek gave birth to daughter Rosemary and son Henry before moving on to North Carolina. The state wasn't to Lewek's liking, and she returned to California.
On her trip home, a third daughter, Kathleen, was born in Wyoming, and Lewek and her then-husband parted ways.
Living with her children in Richmond, Lewek was waitressing on the graveyard shift at a San Francisco Airport restaurant. One night, overly fatigued, she had a car accident while driving home.
It was a pivotal moment, said her daughter Madeline Lewek-Franco of Mountain View.
"She decided, 'That's it, I'm not going to raise my children this way,'" Lewek-Franco said.
Soon after, with assistance from her parents, Lewek moved to Guernewood Park. There she met Robert Lewek, and in 1951 the couple married.
Lewek soon returned to her interrupted education. At Santa Rosa Junior College, she completed her high school equivalency degree and attained an associate's degree, then moved on to Sonoma State University. A political science major, she graduated in 1964.
The following year, she began studying at Golden Gate University School of Law.
"She was going to become an attorney so she could fight for children's rights," Lewek-Franco said.
The task, along with raising young children, proved too arduous, and Lewek left school to become a legal secretary. She proved herself in the offices of attorneys in Guerneville and Santa Rosa, and in 1976 she became a legal assistant.
The following year, she took the helm of the law library, a job she relished, telling one interviewer, "I run up the stairs to work every day."
After retiring in 1983, Lewek consulted with law firms on their library operations.
Other survivors include daughters Susan Lewek of Santa Rosa, Kathleen Lewek of Culver City and Rosie Houweling of Novato; and sons Henry and Albert Lewek, both of Santa Rosa.
No services are planned.
Sam Phillips, rock 'n' roll pioneer
Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley and helped usher in the rock 'n' roll revolution, died Wednesday. He was 80.
Phillips died of respiratory failure at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., son Knox Phillips said. He said his father had been in declining health for a year.
Sam Phillips founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952 and helped launch the career of Presley, then a young singer who had moved from Tupelo, Miss.
He produced Presley's first record, the 1954 single that featured "That's All Right, Mama" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky."
"God only knows that we didn't know it would have the response that it would have," Phillips said in an interview in 1997.
Phillips was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
In 2000, the A&E cable network ran a two-hour biography called "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll."
By 1956, when Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA for $35,000, the rock 'n' roll craze had become a cultural phenomenon and a multimillion-dollar industry.
Phillips began in music as a radio station engineer and later as a disc jockey. He started Sun Records so he could record both rhythm & blues singers and country performers, then called country and western or hillbilly singers.
His plan was to let artists who had no formal training play their music as they felt it, raw and full of life. The Sun motto was "We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime."
In the early days, before Presley, Phillips worked mostly with black musicians, including B.B. King and Rufus Thomas.
After the success of Presley on Sun, others who recorded for the label under Phillips included Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich.
He got out of the recording business in 1962 and sold Sun Records in 1969 to producer Shelby Singleton of Nashville. The Sun studio on Union Avenue in Memphis still exists as a tourist attraction.
Born Samuel Cornelius Phillips in Florence, Ala., Phillips worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and Decatur, Ala., and Nashville, Tenn., before settling in Memphis in 1945. Before founding Sun Records, he was a talent scout who recommended artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. He also worked as an announcer in Memphis.
His sons Knox and Jerry also were record producers.
Jane Barbe, of phone systems
Jane Barbe, who was known to millions, though not by name or appearance, as the voice of telephone-company recordings and voice-mail systems across America, died July 18 in Roswell, Ga., at age 74. The cause was complications of cancer, said her husband, John.
Barbe began her career of delivering impersonal messages in friendly, helpful tones in 1963. Working for Electronic Communications Inc. in Atlanta, she recorded the time and temperature information provided by phone companies, then tackled the "intercept" messages -- such as "The number you have dialed is not in service" -- that greet misdialers and the misinformed.
She also recorded daily horoscopes as well as a short-lived series of seasonal messages from Mrs. Claus, which was discontinued after out-of-state parents complained about the long-distance charges run up by their children.
In the early 1980s, Barbe was chosen by Octel Communications, now part of Avaya, to record messages for its nascent voice-mail technology. Her voice is heard at thousands of companies, helping employees administer personal greetings and outside callers to find their way out of "voice-mail jail."
Born Jane Schneider on July 28, 1928, in Florida, she moved with her family to Atlanta as a child. She studied drama at the University of Georgia.
She is survived by husband John; daughter Susan Stubin of Passaic, N.J.; son David of Athens, Ga.; and seven grandchildren.
