Search for celebrities on Ancestry.com!June 22, 2004
Henry Cassidy
Henry Cassidy loved the outdoors. He found ways of working outdoors -- as a ranch hand and as a park ranger -- and also spent much of his leisure time soaking up the sun or admiring the stars.
Bone cancer claimed his life Friday at the Rohnert Park home of his niece, Vicki France, who was his caregiver. He was 82.
"My uncle loved camping," said France. "We spent a lot of time camping in Cazadero years ago."
An avid fisherman, "he'd cast his line in the ocean, and in rivers and streams," his niece said.
Born in Wichita, Kan., on Nov. 26, 1921, he was a child when his family moved to Sonoma County. Family members and friends knew him as "Hank."
Cassidy worked for various dairies and ranches in the area, including the Watson Dairy Ranch and St. Anthony Farm.
"He was a ranch hand," said his niece, "working a lot with horses and doing maintenance."
In retirement, he became a park ranger, living at and caring for Penngrove Social Fireman Park for 23 years.
"He had a very good sense of humor," said his niece. "He was a very kind man. He was the kind of person who would give you the shirt off his back or help you any way he could."
In addition to his niece, Cassidy is survived by his brothers, Raymond Cassidy of Santa Rosa and Gene Cassidy of Kansas.
There will be a celebration of his life at 6:30 p.m. Friday at Penngrove Social Fireman Park. Arrangements are by Parent-Sorensen Mortuary in Petaluma.
The family suggests memorial donations to Hospice of Petaluma, 416 Payran St., Petaluma 94952.
Doris Dowling, 81
Doris Dowling, the brunette actress who made her screen debut as the hooker in Billy Wilder's classic 1945 drama "The Lost Weekend," has died in Los Angeles at 81, her husband said Monday.
Dowling, who had been in deteriorating health since a heart attack five years ago, died Friday at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, her husband, Leonard Kaufman, told the Associated Press.
The Detroit-born actress started her career on the stage before going to Hollywood with her sister, the late actress Constance Dowling.
Doris Dowling made a splash in "The Lost Weekend," starring Ray Milland as an alcoholic who attracts the attention of the prostitute Gloria. The movie won Academy Awards for best picture, lead actor, director and screenplay.
In her next movie, the Raymond Chandler-scripted "The Blue Dahlia," she played the murder victim.
When her Hollywood career began to wane, she and her sister moved to Rome.
Director Giuseppe de Santis was impressed by the younger Dowling's dark hair, soulful eyes, alabaster complexion and deep voice, which colleagues saw as "the face of Italy." If she brushed up on her Italian, de Santis told her, she could become the star of his new film "Bitter Rice," playing a jewelry thief hiding among Northern Italy's women rice workers.
The highly lauded, low-budget picture, along with "Open City" and a handful of others that showed the realities of Italian life after World War II, helped rebuild the country's film industry and secure its place internationally.
Dowling made five other films in Italy and France, including one in English, Orson Welles' "Othello."
In her later years, she did guest appearances on more than 100 television shows, from the live "Playhouse 90" to such series as "Bonanza," "Barnaby Jones" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." She served on the board of directors of Los Angeles' Theater East.
Dowling marriage three times. In 1960, she marriage producer Leonard B. Kaufman.
Dowling is also survived by one son, Jonathan Shaw.
No memorial services were planned, Kaufman said.
Spencer Klaw, 84
Spencer Klaw, a journalist and author who helped expand the scope of The Columbia Journalism Review in the 1980s, died June 3 at his home in West Cornwall, Conn., his family said. He was 84.
Klaw, who had taught magazine writing at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism since 1970, became editor of the review in 1980 and guided it beyond routine press criticism to include reports on topics like repetitive stress injury and labor relations in news organizations.
At the same time, the review, which had been published under Columbia's auspices since 1962, negotiated a letter of agreement that acknowledged for the first time that the magazine retained "full editorial control."
Klaw was born in New York and graduated in 1941 from Harvard University, where he was the editor of The Crimson. He worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, United Press and The New Yorker and as an editor for the New York Herald Tribune and Fortune magazine. In 1968, he began his teaching career at the University of California at Berkeley, moving to the Columbia journalism school two years later.
He was the author of three books, "The New Brahmins: Scientific Life in America" (1968), "The Great American Medicine Show" (1975) and "Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community" (1993).
After retiring in 1989, Klaw, with his wife, the former Barbara Van Doren, published The Cornwall Chronicle, a monthly newsletter. Barbara Klaw died in 2002.
Klaw is survived by four daughters, Rebecca Klaw and Joanna Klaw Schultz, both of Pittsburgh, Margaret Klaw of Philadelphia and Susan Klaw of Boston; a sister, Margaret Tenney of Berkeley; and nine grandchildren.
June 21, 2004
Preston Hotz
Preston Enslow Hotz, a leading geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey during the Eisenhower administration, died Saturday in Santa Rosa of complications from Alzheimer's disease. Hotz was 91.
He was born in May 1913 in Sonoma, the grandson of department store merchant G.H. Hotz.
At Sonoma High School, Hotz was a standout sprinter on the track team.
"He still holds a high school record for long jump there," said son Ralph P. Hotz, of Broomfield, Colo.
Hotz and his father, Ralph O. Hotz, built the Sonoma Valley's first ham radio in the family's Second Street home in Sonoma, family members said.
Years later, grandson Ivan Hotz recalled watching his grandfather transmit messages from his amateur radio workshop in Menlo Park.
"He would communicate by Morse code to people all over the world," said his grandson, a Petaluma resident, describing his grandfather's walls covered with ham radio memorabilia.
After studying at Santa Rosa Junior College, Hotz earned undergraduate and master's degrees at UC Berkeley.
He took a job in 1938-39 with the U.S. Geological Survey, where he would spend his entire career. During a mapping project in Oregon, he met Jewell "Tita" Cochran in Grants Pass, Ore. The couple marriage in 1940.
World War II led to his reassignment as a strategic minerals geologist, locating iron ore deposits.
During President Dwight D. Eisenhower's term, Hotz was promoted to chief geologist for the western states, based out of Menlo Park. He spent a little more than two years in that role before resuming his regular field work.
"His whole life was fun; he was a geologist," recalled his son, noting that his father didn't seem to need diversions from his profession. "He'd say, 'I'm doing what I want.'"
In 2001, the Hotzes moved to Santa Rosa, returning to be close to their daughter and other family members.
In addition to his son and grandson, Hotz is survived by his wife of 63 years, Tita Hotz; and daughters, Susie Guile of Portland, Ore., and Martha Braet-Ellwanger of Santa Rosa. He also leaves five other grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be at St. Mark Lutheran Church at a later date. Arrangements are being handled by Eggen & Lance Mortuary.
Emma Buck
Emma Buck, who ran a pre-Civil War family farm in Illinois that remained virtually unchanged into the 21st century, died June 5 on the sleigh bed with handmade ticking she had slept in for 98 years, in the log cabin built by her great-uncle, a German immigrant, in 1849.
She was 100 or 101, said Annie Rieken, a close friend and director of the Heritage Foundation of Monroe County, where the farm is located. The cause of death was breast cancer, she said.
The 70-acre farm, a sort of rural Smithsonian, was named one of the state's 10 most endangered sites in 1998 by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Buck, who had pulled the last of her own teeth some years ago, lived there without running water, drawing her water from a well. Until two days before she died, she walked to the outhouse, one of many structures on the farm.
It also has a blacksmith's shop, a smokehouse, a butchering shed, a threshing barn and a rare outdoor bake oven, which was restored by conservators in 1999 with sand and mud from the nearby Mississippi River and wood cut by Buck with a century-old cross-saw.
Buck sharpened scythes on a foot-operated grinding wheel well into her 90s. Speaking with a thick German accent, the slightly persnickety Buck always wore a skirt as she worked.
"Emma could be blunt and coarse and uncouth by Emily Post standards," Rieken said. "But there was a total authenticity about her."
To spend time with Buck was to feel the evocative power of a place that has all but vanished from the American landscape, a fragile holdover where it was possible to encounter wooden butter churns, hobnail boots, copper kettles for making sausage and apple butter and hoops for a Conestoga wagon in the rafters.
"That was German business," she once said, speaking of the heavy trough in the smokehouse, used to scald the fur off carcasses, and her other implements. "What would you do with all these things? Throw them out?"
While contemporaries embraced tractors and other modern machinery, the Buck family stuck to the old ways, largely out of conservatism and stubborn resolve. The farm was settled by Buck's maternal great-grandparents, Christian and Christina Henke, German immigrants from East Friesland who came by boat from New Orleans and settled in western Illinois, about 35 miles down river from St. Louis, in 1841. As was the custom among German families in the area, Emma and her sister Anna, who died in 1992, worked side by side with their father, Fred, who died in 1966. A brother, Albert, died in 1999. Emma Buck never marriage and leaves no surviving family members.
"The Buck farmstead is a rare glimpse into the past," said Mike Jackson, chief architect with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. "It is an extremely well-preserved place, maintained by a woman who lived a 19th-century life throughout the 20th century. Its significance is far greater than its humble origins."
In 1999, Buck deeded the property to Ahne Road Farms Inc., a nonprofit foundation in nearby Waterloo created with her lawyer, Otto Faulbaum, to preserve the farm as a historic site and interpretive center. The goal is to inventory the farm's historic buildings and to lay the groundwork, through grants or other funds, for long-term stewardship.
"Farms like Emma's were once common in the Midwest, but everybody else is gone and now the antiques are hanging in some suburban ranch house somewhere," Faulbaum said. "We would like to restore the whole place as a living history museum and to preserve the farm intact. There is no place like it where everything remains in its original context."
Buck was buried June 6, in the old-fashioned way: by friends and neighbors who lowered her pine coffin into the ground in a corner of the cornfield, the stalks waist high.
She had left clear instructions. "She said she didn't want an open casket," Rieken said. "She said, 'If people couldn't visit me alive, they have no business visiting me as a dirty old dead woman.'"
John Cheasty
John Cheasty, who became the government's star witness after James Hoffa of the Teamsters union recruited him to spy on a Senate committee investigating labor racketeering in the 1950s, died June 14 in Bahama, N.C. He was 96.
The cause was congestive heart failure, Cheasty's family said.
He died at the home of a daughter with whom he had lived for several years, said the Rev. Patrice Cheasty-Miller, the pastor of St. Paul United Methodist Church in Durham.
A New York lawyer and investigator, Cheasty (pronounced CHASE-tee) figured in an episode that began with Hoffa's offer of big-money bribes. Cheasty took the first payment straight to Robert F. Kennedy, the chief counsel to the committee Hoffa wanted Cheasty to infiltrate. Hoffa was arrested after what he believed was a clandestine meeting with Cheasty in a Washington hotel.
But a federal jury acquitted Hoffa of bribery and conspiracy charges, fanning a long-running feud between Hoffa and Kennedy.
With Cheasty's testimony and undercover film showing Hoffa accepting a packet of Senate material, the case seemed solid -- so solid that Kennedy said he would "jump off the Capitol dome" if the government lost.
But on the day Hoffa testified, the former heavyweight champion Joe Louis walked into the courtroom, threw an arm around Hoffa and told reporters he wanted to "see what they're doing to my good friend Jimmy Hoffa."
Louis' appearance "undoubtedly had a strong effect on the black members of the jury," Walter Sheridan wrote in "The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa" (Saturday Review Press, 1972).
However, the jury of eight blacks and four whites told reporters that race was not a factor in their verdict; they said that they voted to acquit Hoffa because they did not believe Cheasty.
June 20, 2004
Francis Heger
Francis Eugene Heger may have grown up poor but the fictional heroes of his youth forged a lifelong belief in social, racial and environmental activism.
Heger, a resident of Sebastopol, died Thursday from a combination of illnesses, including Parkinson's disease and leukemia, that he had been battling for years. He was 73.
Heger, born in Ann Arbor, Mich., served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer for two years during the Korean War before embarking on a lifelong career in education.
He taught English at two Michigan high schools before joining the faculty at Western Michigan University in 1963 where he helped found the Urban Education Program.
"It specialized in educating economically disadvantaged inner city kids to make sure they had equity in education," said his son, Kyle Heger, of Albany.
Graduates of the program held a reunion last year and specifically "talked about how Frank touched their lives and they attributed their political activism and decisions to stay in education to him," said his wife, Kathleen Devereaux.
The couple moved to Sebastopol in 1987 and Heger began working as a psychologist with Santa Rosa City Schools in 1988. He was assigned to Cook Middle School, and Piner and Santa Rosa high schools.
He retired in 1995 but continued to work part-time with the Sonoma County Office of Education until he was hospitalized last week.
During most of his career stops, family members said he chose to work with the most educationally disadvantaged.
Heger's son and wife credit that, and his extensive history of social activism, to growing up poor and the lessons of chivalry he retained from reading about such heroes as Robin Hood and knights in shining armor as a young boy.
"He knew what it was like to be poor and the injustices that would happen because you were poor," his wife said.
His activism began when he was the leader of successful neighborhood efforts that forced the Upjohn pharmaceutical company to deal with a toxic waste dump nearby.
It continued, over the vehement objections of his all-white neighbors, with his decision to sell his Kalamazoo, Mich., home to a black family.
"He wasn't going to be bullied by his neighbors. I was only 8 at the time and I was very scared but I was very proud of him," his son said.
Heger also worked on behalf of and attended two of the largest Vietnam War protest marches, in Michigan and Washington in 1969.
Heger had no true hobbies, preferring to devote most of his time to those who needed him. "He loved his work and his family," his wife said.
But he also loved a challenge. "He always wanted to work with the most challenging of people," she said.
"He taught in a maximum security prison in Michigan, helped out with the Special Olympics in Michigan and served at a rape crisis clinic in Antioch in the '80s," said Kyle Heger.
In addition to his wife and son, Heger is survived by sisters Joyce Sherman of Syracuse, N.Y. and Elizabeth Page of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and a brother, Robert Heger of Lafayette, Ind.
Plans for a memorial service in mid- to late July are pending.
Contributions are suggested to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Ala. 36104.
Al Lapin Jr.,
Al Lapin Jr., entrepreneur and restaurateur who, along with younger brother Jerry, founded the International House of Pancakes in 1958 with a single eatery in Toluca Lake, has died. He was 76.
Lapin died Wednesday at USC/Norris Cancer Center in Los Angeles of cancer, said his son, Randy.
The businessman's roller coaster ride through restaurant chains began with a series of coffee carts called Coffee Time; peaked with IHOP, which acquired Orange Julius, Love's Barbecue and Copper Penny among others; careened through Uncle John's Family Restaurants; and came to earth with Pizza Playhouse, which delivered videos with the pepperoni.
Lapin made and lost fortunes, built and lost businesses. In 1989, he declared bankruptcy.
But years after he left IHOP in 1973, he still got a kick out of seeing one of the pancake houses he established with its signature blue roof, as he traveled the country.
"It's kind of like seeing your child growing up," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. "From time to time, I get irritated because the grass isn't cut right or the paint isn't right. But like any other parent watching a child grow, I know that the child will do whatever it wants to do."
The son of a professional drummer, Lapin was born in New York but moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was a teenager. After serving in the Army, he went through film school at the University of Southern California and worked in television production. He also worked for the Federal Civil Defense Administration, producing films on surviving atomic attacks.
Learning about mass delivery of sustenance in emergencies during his work with the government, Lapin decided he could make money serving the vital substance of coffee to the working world. He set up Coffee Time, catering to Los Angeles businesses.
As he watched fast-food chains such as McDonald's and Taco Bell take off in Southern California, Lapin longed for his own restaurant.
Researching foods he might market to the masses, he settled on pancakes and waffles.
June 19, 2004
Sandra Teuscher
Sandra Kay Teuscher enjoyed living in a tight-knit family where unconditional love and loyalty provided the buoyancy that kept her afloat in times of distress.
Her family was by her side when she died Thursday at her Santa Rosa home after a battle with breast cancer. She was 49.
"Sandy was always there for people, even during her illness," said her mother, Jeanne Pascarella, of Tucson, Ariz. "She was always thinking about others. She was a very loving and caring person."
Born in Sebastopol, she was a graduate of Analy High School and attended the University of Utah. Following a lengthy interruption for marriage and family, she graduated with honors from Sonoma State University and completed her teacher training there.
"She was a dedicated teacher," said her mother, "and she loved children."
A special education instructor in both public and private schools, she taught at Wright School, Steele Lane Annex and New Directions. After her illness forced an early end to her career, she continued providing tutoring and advisory services.
During the early stages of her illness, a blood drive in her name was launched by Traditional Medicinals Inc., the Sebastopol tea company. That blood drive - now in memorium - is ongoing at Blood Bank of the Redwoods.
"Sandy was very talented," said her mother. "She played piano. She did a lot of craft things and made beautiful scrapbooks. She crocheted hats, afghans and slippers."
In addition to her mother, she is survived by her husband, Kevin Teuscher, of Santa Rosa; her children, Michael Teuscher of Santa Rosa and Caitlin Teuscher of Petaluma; her father, Charles Schaeffer of Windsor; her sisters, Stacey Byrne of Santa Rosa and Stefanie Schaeffer of Cloverdale; and her brother Steve Schaeffer of Santa Rosa.
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Tuesday at Santa Rosa Mortuary Chapel, 1900 Franklin Ave., Santa Rosa. Private Interment will follow at Sebastopol Memorial Lawn.
The family suggests memorial donations to Sutter VNA Hospice.
Jacek Kuron
Jacek Kuron, who inspired and tutored generations of Poles to struggle against Communist rule, serving as the ultimately successful godfather of a resistance that coalesced around the Solidarity labor union movement, died Thursday in Warsaw. He was 70 years old and had been ill for more than a year.
A spokesman for the Hospital of the Interior Ministry announced his death, the Associated Press reported.
Kuron's death came under the jurisdiction of the same ministry that had been his host for an imprisonment of almost 10 years in the Communist era. At the end, however, it was a benevolent ministry in a democratic Poland that cared for him as an honored citizen who had helped to bring about Poland's emergence from totalitarian rule, a man who went on to serve in Parliament and as labor minister, and who also ran for president, winning 10 percent of the vote in 1995.
On Thursday, his old partners in resistance joined with current political leaders in praising Kuron, who had challenged Communist rulers first as an ardent and ideological young party member in the 1950s, and then kept training generations of dissidents as an outcast who was continuously hounded and imprisoned.
"Without him, the events of August 1980 would have been impossible," said Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity and democratic Poland's first president, referring to the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard and the union's historic victory.
In the final chapter of his fight against the Communist system, in the 1980s, Kuron gained national prominence and international attention as the senior organizer and guiding spirit of KOR, the Committee to Assist Workers, which first mobilized support for striking workers in 1976. It soon became a rallying point for many of the country's intellectuals, cultural figures and students who provided support and resources to the industrial workers, miners and farmers then trying to build an independent labor federation.
Thanom Kittikachorn
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thanom Kittikachorn, a military ruler of Thailand who helped the United States during the Vietnam War before being ousted in a popular uprising in 1973, has died at the age of 92.
Thanom died late Wednesday at Bangkok Hospital, where he had been treated since Jan. 19 after suffering a stroke, a hospital statement said. He never fully recovered from brain surgery, it said.
Thanom came to be known as one of Thailand's "Three Tyrants" when he ran the country in the 1960s and early 1970s with his son, Col. Narong Kittikachorn, and Narong's father-in-law, Field Marshal Praphas Charusathien.
The three were driven into exile following a bloody student-led uprising in October 1973. They were accused of nepotism, corruption and ordering troops to fire on protesters in the streets of Bangkok during the uprising. The official death toll in the uprising was 77, with hundreds injured, although many believe the number of dead was higher.
Thanom's regime was noted for its close ties with the United States.
During the Vietnam War, his government allowed tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen to be stationed in Thailand and hosted U.S. air bases from which most bombing of North Vietnam and Laos was carried out.
At the same time, his regime's heavy-handed rule brought it resentment at home. Despite a veneer of democracy, Thanom's government moved against even mild dissent, sweeping away opponents in parliament.
The regime's leaders also allegedly used state funds for their own benefit -- most notably from the official lottery -- and steered contracts to cronies and companies in which they were given stakes.
After Thanom and his colleagues fell in 1973, the new government seized assets from the three worth about $30 million, believed to have been illegally acquired.
Robert Teeter
Washington -- Robert M. Teeter, a polling expert and political consultant who helped guide the Republican Party and its presidential nominees for more than 20 years, died June 13 at his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 65.
The cause was cancer, his son, John, said.
From 1968 through 1992, Teeter took the public's temperature on political issues and Republican presidential candidates, innovating or refining statistical techniques to peer inside the mind of the American voter. Teeter worked closely with the elder George Bush from the time he was Republican national chairman in the early 1970s through his successful presidential campaign in 1988 and unsuccessful re-election bid in 1992, when Teeter was campaign chairman.
Teeter is credited with two innovations during the 1976 presidential campaign, although neither was enough to re-elect his client, President Gerald Ford. He began daily polling, known as a tracking poll, leading up to the Wisconsin Republican primary, which pitted the president against former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Later, Teeter employed the "Rose Garden strategy," which positioned the incumbent in overtly presidential settings during the campaign, but kept him largely out of direct political engagement with his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Ford narrowed a wide gap but ultimately lost.
"If you look at Bob Teeter's career over 40 years, every major innovation in political survey research has his fingerprint on it," said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster and Teeter's partner at the NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling program.
In 1967, Teeter joined Market Opinion Research, a marketing and political polling firm in Detroit. Over the next five years, he expanded the company from a firm hired occasionally by Republicans running for Congress to one tied directly to the party.
"His firm was dedicated toward helping the party out, not just candidates," said Lance Tarrance, a longtime Republican polling consultant who was the chief pollster for Jack Kemp's campaign for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Teeter was also known among his colleagues for unfailing politeness, and for tough but fair campaigns.
"He was a force for civility," said Adam Clymer, the political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey and a former political correspondent for The New York Times.
Teeter was a moderate Republican whose own politics did not always fall in line with the party or even with the candidates for whom he polled. Voters, Teeter argued, cared less about issues than they did about a sense of a man. "They don't line up eight issues and decide which one they line up with more," Teeter said in a 1991 interview. "They want someone they trust to make value judgments for them."
In addition to his son, Teeter is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; and his daughter, Katherine, all of Ann Arbor; and his brothers Philip, of Wellington, Colo., and John, of Downingtown, Pa.
