Categotry Archives: Extraordinary People

The final year of Betty Matas’ life was full of adventure.
Last April, she and her husband Bob decided to retire to the desert. To make the 2,500-mile trip from Queens, N.Y., to Sedona, Ariz., the couple didn’t rent a car or take a train. Instead, Betty and Bob hailed a yellow taxi cab.
The Matases were life-long New Yorkers, the kind who never learned how to drive and relied entirely on public transportation. Since flying would have been difficult for their cats, Pretty Face and Cleopatra, the pair decided to hire cabbie Douglas Guldeniz to take them on a road trip across 10 states.
The Brooklyn hack, who had driven the Matases on a shopping trip three months earlier, was happy to get out of the city for a change. At the standard rate, the six-day trip would have cost about $5,000 each way, but Guldeniz only asked for a flat fare of $3,000, plus gas, meals and lodging.
When the trio left New York City on April 3, their story had already been featured in newspapers across the country. The Daily News even had a reporter follow Guldeniz’s cab and blog about the journey.
Guldeniz drove for about 10 hours a day, following a U-Haul truck carrying the couple’s possessions. At each stop, Betty took the time to stretch her legs and make conversation with the many waitresses, truckers and reporters she encountered. “Every state that we hit, people would say ‘Are you the ones?’ and we would say ‘Yes, we are the ones,'” Bob said.
The cross-country trek in the 2006 Ford Escape Hybrid SUV was said to be the longest taxi ride in New York history.
Upon their arrival in Sedona, the trio were met by a welcoming committee and a crowd of well-wishers. Sedona Mayor Pud Colquitt gave Betty and Bob a bag of souvenirs, and their real estate agent presented them with the keys to their new retirement home.
Betty spent 38 years working as an executive secretary to the president of Klemptner Advertising. Although she missed New York, she had no regrets about moving to Arizona.
Betty died on Aug. 20 of pneumonia and a heart attack. She was 75.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a quiet icon of the civil rights era whose actions led the Supreme Court to strike down state laws requiring segregation in situations involving interstate transport, died on Aug. 10 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. She was 90.
The Baltimore native was the sixth of nine children who were just two generations free of slavery. She attended some high school classes while earning a living cleaning houses and caring for the children of white people. During World War II, the mother of two worked in a plant that made bombers.
Although she was not a member of any civil rights organization, Kirkaldy did take a stand for equality. More than a decade before Rosa Parks made headlines for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white passenger, Kirkaldy made the same decision.
On July 16, 1944, the 27-year-old black woman paid $5 to ride a Greyhound bus from Gloucester, Va., to Baltimore, Md. When the bus became crowded, the driver ordered her and her seatmate to relinquish their seat to a white couple. Kirkaldy, who had just suffered a miscarriage and was sitting in the section reserved for “colored” people, refused. She also refused to let her fellow passenger, a mother holding a child, relinquish the seat.
The bus driver then drove to the jail in Saluda, Va., and summoned the local sheriff. When a deputy climbed aboard the bus and ordered Kirkaldy to disembark, she tore up the arrest warrant and tossed the remnants out the window. Enraged by her impudence, the officer grabbed Kirkaldy’s arm and tried to drag her off the bus. She fought back and was arrested.
Kirkaldy was eventually charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia’s segregation law. The mother of two pleaded guilty to the first charge and paid a fine of $100 because she admitted to kicking the deputy “in a very bad place.” Although she pleaded not guilty to the second charge, Kirkaldy was convicted and fined $10. She refused to pay that fine and appealed the conviction. With help from the N.A.A.C.P., Kirkaldy received legal representation from William H. Hastie, who would become the nation’s first African-American federal magistrate and the dean of Howard Law School, and Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Marshall took Morgan v. Virginia all the way to the high court, and argued that segregation on modes of interstate travel violated the “commerce clause” of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the right “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” In June 1946, the Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the Virginia law requiring the races to be separated on interstate buses was unconstitutional and an invalid interference in interstate commerce.
Although Greyhound immediately ordered its drivers not to enforce segregation laws, many bus companies, mostly in the south, did not change their segregation policies. To test compliance of the Supreme Court decision, an interracial group of 16 civil rights activists embarked on the first Freedom Ride in 1947. Known as the “Journey of Reconciliation,” these bus and train trips resulted in 12 arrests and inspired the song, “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!”
After the case ended, Kirkaldy lived a fairly quiet life running a cleaning and child care service in New York. With the winnings from a radio contest, she was able to earn a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University in 1985, and a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College in 1990.
During celebrations of its 350th anniversary, the town of Gloucester, Va., honored Kirkaldy with a day called “A Homecoming for Irene Morgan.” Four scholarships were also established in her name. In 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second highest civilian honor in the United States.

Yone Minagawa, the oldest person in the world, died on Aug. 13. Cause of death was not released. She was 114.
Born in Japan on Jan. 4, 1893, Minagawa married and bore five children. Widowed at an early age, she single-handedly raised her daughter and four sons by growing and selling flowers and vegetables.
Minagawa lived through four Japanese emperors and at least six wars. She was already in her 50s when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked with atomic bombs in 1945. Over the next half century, Minagawa watched her country literally rise from the ashes of destruction and develop into an economic and technological superpower.
Minagawa lived on her own until 2005 when she moved into a nursing home in the southwestern Japanese city of Fukuoka. Although she spent most of her days in bed resting, Minagawa occasionally ventured into the dining room on a motorized wheelchair and rarely missed the home’s weekly sing-along. She also enjoyed playing shamisen, a three-stringed musical instrument, and had a fondness for Japanese cakes filled with sweet bean paste.
The supercentenarian was named the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records in January following the death of Emma Faust Tillman, also 114. Minagawa credited her longevity to eating well and getting a good night’s sleep. She is survived by her daughter, seven grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
With Minagawa’s death, American Edna Parker, 114, is now the oldest person on the planet.
• Watch a Video About Minagawa

Matthew R. Nagle, a quadriplegic who once participated in a groundbreaking, mind-control experiment, died on July 23 of a blood infection. He was 27.

A Massachusetts native, Nagle played football at Weymouth High School and set a record his senior year for making 33 unassisted tackles. The diehard New England Patriots and Red Sox fan had just passed the postal service exam when his life was forever altered by a stranger.

On July 3, 2001, a brawl broke out after the Fourth of July fireworks display at Wessagusset Beach in Weymouth, Mass. Nagle jumped into the fray to help one of his friends and sustained a stab wound to the neck. The 8-inch blade severed his spinal cord. The attack left him paralyzed from the shoulders down and unable to breathe without a ventilator. When scar tissue grew over his vocal cords, Nagle lost most of his ability to talk as well. The final years of his life were spent at his parents’ house and at the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass.

Determined to walk again, Nagle volunteered to become the first person to have a sensory chip tapped directly into his brain. The Braingate Neural Interface System was conceived by John Donoghue, the head of Brown University’s neuroscience department and a cofounder of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, a Massachusetts company that develops neural stimulation, sensing and processing technology. Although other researchers are working on similar brain-computer interfaces, Cyberkinetics was the first to receive FDA approval for human testing.

In 2004, researchers implanted a 4-millimeter square silicon chip studded with 100 hair-thin microelectrodes into Nagle’s primary motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls movement. Soon after the surgery, he was able to move a cursor on a computer and control a television with his thoughts. Nagle could also draw on a computer, check e-mail, play simple online video games and command a prosthetic hand to open and close. Researchers at Cyberkinetics hope the results of the Braingate experiment will someday help people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other conditions that impair movement and communication.

Due to FDA regulations, and the set parameters of the study, the Braingate sensory chip was removed from Nagle’s brain a year after it was embedded. Electrodes were later implanted to stimulate Nagle’s diaphragm, which allowed him to breathe without a ventilator. This also enabled him to pilot a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube.

Nagle slipped into a coma on July 17 and was diagnosed with sepsis, an infection of the blood. After doctors declared him brain dead, Nagle’s parents, Ellen and Pat Nagle, donated his liver, kidneys and his skin to patients on the organ donor registry.

The Matthew Nagle Spinal Injury Foundation was established soon after the attack. In the past six years, benefit dinners, golf tournaments and charity bike races have helped the non-profit organization raise thousands for people with spinal cord injuries. Dr. Jon Mukand, one of the principal investigators of the BrainGate trial, plans to write a book about Nagle tentatively titled, “At Knifepoint: Brain Implant, Stem Cells, and Matthew Nagle’s Quest for Recovery.”

Nicholas Cirignano, the man who stabbed Nagle, was convicted in 2005 of armed assault with intent to kill and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence; however, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office plans to treat Nagle’s death as a homicide.