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Geraldine Doyle

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Categories: Extraordinary People

Before World War II, 12 million American women worked outside the home, usually in traditionally female and poorly paid occupations, like the service sector. The rest of the female population generally married, raised children and volunteered for social and religious organizations. But when the fighting in Europe and Japan called men away from their jobs, 6 million additional women left the home and supported the war effort by entering the work force.

One woman who answered the call was Geraldine Hoff Doyle of Lansing, Mich. After graduating from high school, the 17-year-old cellist took a job at the American Broach & Machine Co., a metal-processing plant in Ann Arbor. Doyle was wearing a red and white polka-dot bandanna and leaning over a piece of machinery one day when a United Press International photographer took her picture. That image inspired J. Howard Miller, a graphic artist at the U.S. War Production Coordinating Committee, to illustrate a poster featuring a woman wearing a similar bandanna and the motto: “We Can Do It!”.

The woman in the poster became known as a “Rosie the Riveter,” after a 1942 song of the same name, and she helped to encourage women to find jobs and achieve their economic independence. When the war ended and the men returned home, women were generally expected to return to their domestic lives, but Doyle’s famous poster empowered some to buck tradition and take control of their own destiny.

Doyle actually left her factory job shortly after the photograph was taken because a co-worker had badly injured her hands while toiling at the machines. Fearing a similar fate, Doyle took safer jobs, like working at a soda fountain and a book store. She wed Leo Doyle, a young dental school student, and together they raised six children. Over the course of their 66-year marriage, the couple also ran a successful dental practice in Lansing. He died in February 2010.

Doyle didn’t realize her place in women’s history until the early 1980s when she saw an article in Modern Maturity magazine, and connected the UPI photo of her younger self with the iconic “We Can Do It!” poster. The image also appeared on the cover of the Time-Life book “The Patriotic Tide: 1940-1950.” The “We Can Do It!” poster was later used by the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s and appeared on a 33-cent stamp issued in 1999 by the U.S. Postal Service.

Another Michigan woman, Rose Will Monroe, who was featured in a promotional film about women factory workers, was also a well-known “Rosie.” When people would call Doyle a “Rosie the Riveter,” she would always correct them and say she was the ‘We Can Do It!” girl.

Doyle died on Dec. 26 from complications of severe arthritis. She was 86.

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A Look Back

Categories: Misc.

hourglass.jpgSome people view obituaries as morbid stories, but in truth only one line of an obit deals with death. The rest of the story focuses on the amazing lives people lead. In 2010, these 10 obituaries were the stories that most resonated with me:
* Robert B. Parker, the bestselling mystery writer who created Spenser, a tough Boston private detective who was the hero of nearly 40 novels
* Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person who was ever officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II
* Eugene Allen, a former White House butler who worked for eight presidents
* Isaac Bonewits, an author, educator and archdruid emeritus of Ar nDraiocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship
* Jack Horkheimer, the award-winning astronomer who entertained millions as the host of the PBS show “Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer”
* Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Senator John Edwards who publicly struggled with incurable cancer and her husband’s infidelity
* Daniel Schorr, a journalist who was barred from the U.S.S.R. for repeatedly defying Soviet censors and ended up on President Richard Nixon’s Enemies List
* Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who served 51 years in the United States Senate, longer than anyone else in history
* Bob Guccione, the founder and former chief executive of Penthouse magazine
* Howard Zinn, historian, civil rights activist and author of “A People’s History of the United States”
To all of you who’ve lost someone dear, may they rest in peace.

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Andy Irons

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Categories: Sports

airons.jpgFormer world champion surfer Philip Andrew Irons was hooked on the sport from his very first wave. In an interview with ISurfBecause, he described riding that wave as one of the purest moments of his life.
“I went left, right, left and the wave never broke. And I thought right then, ‘This is the coolest thing in the world,’” he said.
Born in Hawaii, Irons was raised by his mother, a shop clerk, and his father, a carpenter, in Kauai. He and his brother Bruce learned how to surf as children on the dangerous reefs of the North Shore. He joined surfing’s Top 44 on the 1998 World Tour when he was only 17 years old.
Irons struggled with anger issues, loneliness, substance abuse and a frustration with the promotional aspects of his career, but his inner demons were silenced when he was riding the waves. In the water, Irons’ talent and drive helped him to win three Quiksilver Pro France titles, two Rip Curl Pro Search titles and 20 elite tour victories including the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing four times from 2002 to 2006. He was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in 2008.
His competitive nature also got him into trouble. Public, mid-competition fights with his brother were not uncommon, and his rivalry with champion surfer Kelly Slater made headlines for years. Slater had six world titles under his belt when Irons defeated him in 2002. Irons won again in 2003 and 2004, which earned him a reputation as a king-slayer. Slater emerged from semi-retirement, and reclaimed the title in 2005. The clash of titans came to a head the following year at the Pipeline Masters final when the pair battled the waves, and each other. After 35 grueling minutes, Irons earned a perfect 10 and won the competition.
Irons left the tour in 2009 to “get back to surfing for fun.” A year later he returned to the competitive arena to stage a comeback. Irons was supposed to compete in the 2010 Rip Curl Pro Search in Puerto Rico, but withdrew from the event for health reasons.
Irons’ body was found in a Dallas-area hotel room on Nov. 2. Cause of death is under investigation, though police said there were no signs of trauma or foul play. He was 32. At the time of his death, Irons’ wife, Lyndie, was expecting their first child.
[Update - Dec. 16, 2010: Andrew Axel Irons was born to Lyndie Irons, widow of Andy Irons, on Dec. 16.]
[Update - June 11, 2011: Autopsy results showed that Andy Irons died from a sudden heart attack due to severe hardening of the arteries. A secondary cause of death was listed as "acute mixed drug ingestion. Toxicology tests found found methadone, Xanax, benzoylecgonine and a "trace amount of methamphetamine" in his system.]
–Photo by Jose Goulao. Used with permission

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Bob Guccione

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Categories: Business

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione, the founder and former chief executive of Penthouse magazine, was a man who took calculated risks. Some paid off, others cost him millions.
The Brooklyn native originally planned to become a Catholic priest, and even attended the seminary, but dropped out when puberty caused his hormones to kick in. He wed at 18 and fathered a daughter named Toni, but the marriage foundered, and Guccione headed to Europe to work as a painter and journalist. He wed a second time, to British singer Muriel Hudson, and fathered four more children (Bob Jr., Nina, Anthony and Nick); however, his habit of amassing large debts ended that union.
Unable to make a decent living as an artist, Guccione next decided to try his luck at pornographic publishing. With less than $2,000 on hand, he launched Penthouse in 1965 as a low-brow competitor to Playboy, the glamorous adult magazine run by Hugh Hefner. In the magazine’s early years, Guccione couldn’t afford professional talent so he ended up photographing most of the models. He enjoyed pushing boundaries with each spread, and bragged about his decision to publish “lesbians, threesomes, full-frontal male nudity, erect penises.” Tabloid journalism, a racy letters column and beautiful centerfold models known as “Pets” helped Penthouse find an audience in the U.K. and the U.S. At its peak in the 1970s, Penthouse reportedly sold nearly 5 million copies a month.
Penthouse also inflamed the public’s passions with its controversial offerings. Feminists and conservatives blasted its raunchy content. In 1984, the magazine ran a sexually explicit pictorial of Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to win the title of Miss America. The pictures cost Williams her crown, but generated $14 million in profit for Guccione.
A year later, Guccione offered the serial killer known as The Unabomber a monthly column in Penthouse if he promised to stop taking lives. Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. The Unabomber, gave Guccione permission to print his unedited manifesto, but with one caveat: he reserved the right to murder one more person. Guccione refused to take the bait. A tip from Kaczynski’s brother led to his capture in 1996. Kaczynski later pleaded guilty to 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing and using bombs and three counts of murder, and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Penthouse began to lose readers in 1986 when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry, prompting newsstands and convenience stores to pull the publication from their racks. In the 1990s, sales took a hit as subscribers began to seek out free porn and X-rated video online.
Although Guccione was once listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people ($400 million net worth in 1982), bad investments and risky ventures eventually cost him much of his fortune. He spent $17.5 million producing an X-rated version of “Caligula.” The 1979 film, which starred Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole, tanked at the box office. He tried to open a $200 million casino in Atlantic City but a stubborn resident and a licensing issue stalled construction for years. Guccione was forced to pay $45 million in back taxes in 1985 and another $80 million in 1992. And in 2003, General Media, the publishing arm of Penthouse International, declared bankruptcy.
His personal life was no less tumultuous. Guccione’s third wife, Kathy Keeton, an exotic dancer who was entrusted with the financial management of his publishing empire, died in 1997 from breast cancer. Her death affected him deeply. He wed a fourth time in 2006, to exotic dancer April Dawn Warren, but spent much of their marriage battling throat and lung cancer. Relations with some of his children also fell apart over money matters. In recent years, soaring debts forced Guccione to sell off many of his possessions, including an impressive art collection and his 27-room mansion in Manhattan.
Guccione died on Oct. 20 of lung cancer. He was 79.

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Del Scharber

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Categories: Medicine

dscharber.jpgDelphine Katherine Scharber was 23 years old and recently wed when her kidneys began to fail.
It was 1965, and doctors at the University of Minnesota had only been performing kidney transplants for two years. But the operation was a risk Scharber, and her mother Ottilia Winter, 52, were willing to take.
When she went under the knife, Scharber was one of the first volunteers to ever receive a kidney transplant, and her mother was one of the first living donors. Despite the newness of the procedure, the operation was a success and the donated kidney gave Scharber another 45 years to be married to her husband Bob, raise her daughter Julie, watch her grandsons play football and volunteer at her church. She also spent three decades working as a fiscal officer at the University of Minnesota-College of Education.
“She was always happy, always smiling,” said Diane Wiener, who volunteered with Scharber. “She once told me, ‘Every day I have is a gift. I could have not been here.’”
Kidney transplants are now one of the most common transplant operations performed in the U.S. At the time of this writing, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network reports that more than 108,000 people are on a waiting list for a kidney. Although 58 percent of patients who receive kidneys from living donors survive for more than 10 years, Scharber was one of the longest-living kidney transplant patients in history.
Scharber died on Sept. 29 of a rare endocrine cancer. She was 69. At the time of her death, the donated kidney was still functioning.

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Jack Horkheimer

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Categories: Education

jhorkheimer.jpgFoley Arthur “Jack” Horkheimer, the award-winning astronomer who entertained millions as the host of the PBS show “Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer,” died on Aug. 20 of a respiratory ailment. He was 72.
Born in Randolph, Wis., Horkheimer was always in poor health. As a child, he suffered from severe allergies, depression and numerous phobias, including acrophobia (fear of heights) and agoraphobia (fear of crowds). Throughout his life, he also battled bronchiectasis, a degenerative lung disease.
Horkheimer’s father, the longtime mayor of Randolph, reportedly urged him to be an athlete, and his mother wanted him to become a priest. He preferred to please people, working as a disc jockey, a jazz organist, a playwright and a nightclub entertainer. After dropping out of Marquette University and the Honolulu School of Fine Arts in Hawaii, Horkheimer attended Purdue for six years, where he studied drama and worked as a writer/producer in Purdue’s Repertory Theatre. Once Horkheimer finally earned a bachelor’s degree, he moved to South Florida because the warm, humid air helped his inflamed lungs.
While Horkheimer never took an accredited astronomy course, his future would soon be written in the stars. A meeting with Art Smith, chief of the Southern Cross Astronomical Society, led to a job running the brand new Space Transit Planetarium (also known as The Miami Planetarium). With a $150,000 Spitz projector at his disposal, Horkheimer created multimedia stargazing shows that were a memorable mix of fact and fantasy. He called it “cosmic theater.”
“A planetarium is not for scientists. It’s not for the Ph.D.’s. It’s for the people,” Horkheimer said in a 1982 profile in The Miami Herald. “A planetarium is supposed to mediate between the scientists and the public. It’s to teach, to tantalize. Real astronomers aren’t supposed to be running planetariums. It’s living death for them. They’re supposed to be researching.”
Over the next 35 years, Horkheimer served as executive director of the planetarium, putting on shows and teaching the public about astronomy. He took his message to the masses with “Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler,” a weekly TV series made available to all PBS stations free of charge. The one- and five-minute episodes offered astronomical lore and advice on what to look for in the night sky. The name was changed to “Star Gazer” in the 1990s to make it easier for children to find the correct Website.
With infectious enthusiasm and over-the-top showmanship, Horkheimer used “Star Gazer” to sell the idea of naked-eye astronomy with a memorable three-word motto: “Keep looking up.” Sky & Telescope Magazine described the show as “arguably the most successful five-minute program in television history.” When “Star Gazer” celebrated its 30th anniversary on Nov. 4, 2006, over 1,500 weekly episodes had been recorded. In recent years, those episodes have been offered on iTunes and YouTube in the form of a video podcast.
Horkheimer was a founding member of the International Planetarium Society, a founding co-editor of “The Planetarian” and a past editor of “Southern Skies.” He won numerous awards, including an Emmy and a Telly, but was most proud of his work encouraging young astronomers to explore the heavens. Each year, The Astronomical League presents The Jack Horkheimer Award for Exceptional Service by a Young Astronomer; the winner receives a $1,000 check and a high-quality telescope.
Horkheimer was a lover of good music, good food and champagne and once collected old Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. Although his lifelong contributions to popularizing astronomy were occasionally derided by some in the field for not being more academic, the International Astronomical Union honored his efforts by renaming “Asteroid 1999 FD9″ to “Asteroid Horkheimer.”
Long before his death, Horkheimer penned a fitting epitaph:
“Keep looking up was my life’s admonition,
I can do little else in my present position.”

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Isaac Bonewits

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Categories: Writers/Editors

ibonewits.jpgPhillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, an author, educator and archdruid emeritus of Ar nDraiocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship, died on Aug. 12 of colon cancer. He was 60.

Born in Royal Oak, Mich., Bonewits was only 13 years old when he first became interested in the occult. Although he briefly considered becoming a priest, and even entered a Catholic high-school seminary, he decided against that path and began studying magic, parapsychology and the structure of rituals.

Bonewits joined the Reformed Druids of North America while attending the University of California, Berkeley, where he would earn a bachelor’s degree in magic and thaumaturgy in 1970. That degree, which was signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, led to a publishing contract and the release of his first book, “Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic.”

Over the next four decades, Bonewits became one of North America’s leading experts on ancient and modern druidism, witchcraft and the rapidly growing Earth religions movement. He was a 3rd Degree Druid within the United Ancient Order of Druids, a retired High Priest in both the Gardnerian and the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn traditions of Wicca and an initiate of Santeria and the “Caliphate Line” of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Despite all these achievements, Bonewits said he was not a pagan spiritual leader, but merely one of the Neopagan movement’s better-known “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Bonewits edited the neopagan journal, Gnostica, and founded the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League, a civil liberties organization for members of minority belief systems. He published several books (“Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism,” “Neopagan Rites” and “Real Energy: Systems, Spirits, and Substances to Heal, Change and Grow,”) and released two albums (“Be Pagan Once Again” and “Avalon Is Rising.”) In August 2010, he donated all of his scholarly papers to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for inclusion in the American Religions Collection.

When not focused on his religious and occultist path, Bonewits made a living as a computer consultant, technical writer and professional speaker. He married six times, the last to tarot expert and Wiccan priestess, Phaedra Bonewits, with whom he also co-founded the Real Magic School, an online school of neopagan and general occult studies. Bonewits also fathered one son, Arthur Lipp-Bonewits.

In 1983, Bonewits launched Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), an international fellowship devoted to creating a public tradition of neopagan druidry. Druids are polytheistic nature worshippers who practice in a solitary fashion or in congregations known as groves. The organization, which was founded with the goal of “researching and expanding sound modern scholarship about the ancient Celts and other Indo-European peoples, in order to reconstruct what the Old Religions of Europe really were,” currently has more than 1,100 members. ADF plans to hold a special service to celebrate Bonewits’s life and achievements on Aug. 19 during Summerland, an ADF unity festival and pagan spiritual retreat in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

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Edith Shain

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Categories: Extraordinary People, Medicine

shain.jpgWhen Edith “Edie” Shain kissed a stranger 65 years ago, she became a part of history.
The New York native was working as a nurse at the now-demolished Doctors Hospital in Manhattan on August 14, 1945, when President Harry S. Truman announced that the war with Japan had ended. To celebrate, Shain headed to Times Square, where she encountered an equally-joyous American seaman wearing a dark-blue uniform. Just as she emerged from the subway, the sailor pulled Shain into his arms and kissed her. That kiss was captured by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who published the image in Life Magazine. It eventually became the most reproduced picture in the history of the publication.
For decades, Eisenstaedt didn’t know the identity of the couple immortalized in his iconic V-J Day photograph; the couple apparently parted ways and disappeared into the cheering crowd right after the kiss ended. But in the late 1970s, Shain wrote to Eisenstaedt and claimed to be the nurse in the picture.
Shain’s letter gave the editors of Life Magazine the idea to write a followup article. That story, which appeared in the Aug. 1980 issue, urged the kissing sailor to come forward. Two months later, the editors noted that 11 men and three women had claimed to be the subjects of the photograph. Although Shain is generally considered to have the best claim — Eisenstaedt agreed that she was the woman in the picture after meeting her in California — the identity of the sailor remains a mystery.
“Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country,” Shain once said. “I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him.”
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, artist J. Seward Johnson II designed a 25-foot, 6,000 pound replica of the kiss that he called “Unconditional Surrender.” A life-size aluminum statue of the famous embrace also stands in Times Square, and each year couples gather near it and reenact the amorous moment of jubilation.
After the war ended, Shain earned an education degree from New York University. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and spent the next three decades teaching kindergarten and first grade and raising a family. To make ends meet, she moonlighted as a nurse at an area hospital.
Once Shain went public about appearing in the Life magazine photo, veterans groups around the nation invited her to take part in commemorative events. In 2008, she even served as the grand marshal in New York City’s Veterans Day parade.
Shain died on June 20 of liver cancer. She was 91.
(Photo by Troy Li. Used with permission.)


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